Events

Andrew Cook and I have spoken on a number of occasions about my project and finding a hook is what Andrew has routinely asked me to do. Events are my hook.

After spending much time reflecting on my project and on the words of the Gurus I knew taking solid action was in order. After exploring some other interesting ideas and directions revolving around Data visualisation, like a tool for creating real-time unique visualisations by combining unrelated data feeds from numerous API’s (something like ifttt.com for visualisation), I came back round reassured that my idea…pitch…direction is the right one for this project.

To follow this up nicely Graham and Andrew presented us with the requirements for our brief to be submitted this week. 100 words, Visual Plan up until the Christmas break and some words about what has become clearer…what we know now that we didn’t before. This has been great encouragement to rework our 50 words from Gurus Day and to give me a clear, thorough statement to use as a guiding light throughout the next months of this project. So here goes:

Citizen Journalism is happening right now by people who don’t even realise they are journalists. Thousands of pieces of content are generated every second across the internet much of it carrying a great depth of underlying data. Focusing on events this project will build a tool that will collect and visualise content from users at events, and display it in real time. Through data visualisation, patterns and collisions will be identified and shared in real time to give a deeper understanding of the events unfolding. 

Whilst this serves as an accurate representation of where I am now, expect my project to change. I do.

#mozzfest

Tomorrow (Wednesday 7th November) i’m heading to London to attend the annual Mozilla Festival - http://mozillafestival.org/

They sum it up quite nicely…

A yearly celebration of learning and innovation. Gathering passionate people like you to explore the web, learn together, and make things that can change the world.

Whilst I expect to find many aspects of the weekend incredibly interesting, the ‘Source Code for Journalism‘ part should be especially relevant to my project. I’m going to take this weekend as it comes and see what I can get stuck into. I’m not actually going with anyone in particular…so that should be interesting! Jon Rogers and Neil Dawson are two other Dundee’ers that I know are going so I won’t be entirely alone.

Plan

This plan outlines the next few weeks ahead. With most aspects of this project, it’s open to change. Most of my time will be researching and driving the direction of my project forward. I have been hesitant to plan too far ahead as I suspect the research will guide my plan as times goes on.

 I will be covering the next week extensively on Twitter and Instagram most likely, but I will do a full write up of the event and what I take away from it all.