Tag: Data

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Digital

[FILM] In Limbo

Antoine Viviani’s In Limbo, a personalized interactive film that reveals the traces we leave on the Internet, launches today

Live the interactive experience at nfb.ca/inlimbo

February 12, 2015 – Montreal, National Film Board of Canada

What personal traces do we leave on the Internet? And just how permanent and public are they? These are the questions addressed by the interactive film In Limbo (nfb.ca/inlimbo), directed by Antoine Viviani (INSITU), co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), ARTE France, and Providences, and available online as of today. In Limbo creates a disturbing mirror image of data incorporated from its users’ accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn), making them realize how big a footprint they’re leaving on the Web. Eight people, including computer pioneer Gordon Bell and Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, also share their thoughts and experiences regarding this new social phenomenon.

In Limbo is part of a broader reflection being conducted by the NFB French Program’s Digital Studio about how the digital world is changing us. Launched last fall, the mobile app Cancer of Time (NFB/France Télévisions) explores our inability to enjoy a bit of downtime from our electronic devices. The upcoming interactive documentary series Do Not Track (NFB/ARTE/BR), slated for release in April 2015, takes this reflection to another level, with particular focus on the commercial aspects of digital life. Producer Louis-Richard Tremblay commented, “We’ve been exploring these questions for over two years. Our research has brought us into contact with the founders and developers of technologies that are transforming our existence into digital content. It’s fascinating what goes on in the electronic circuits behind your screen. How does that involve you? What are the goals pursued by the alchemists of the digital age: To make you immortal? To sell you the latest gadget? Or simply to sell you?”

Quick Facts

  • In Limbo, an instruction manual for an eye-opening experience
  • Designed as a personalized interactive experience for computers and tablets, In Limbo integrates its users’ data into its story. Built around a 30-minute film, In Limbo enables users to explore the Internet and the digital world by means of their own input into the global data stream.
  • The user is invited to connect to their Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Gmail and LinkedIn accounts. All the data collected are seamlessly integrated into In Limbo in 12 personalized sequences.
  • Images of the eight interview subjects are captured by a Kinect camera, and they see themselves being digitized and converted into lines of code, in a constant interplay between the Web and reality.
  • Meandering through the almost infinite memory of big data, the user will begin to grasp the dreams and fears of this new connected humanity. What are we building: a new civilization, or simply a vast data cemetery?

Participants in the 30-minute film

  • Gordon Bell, a researcher emeritus at Microsoft
  • Ray Kurzweil, a director of engineering at Google
  • Paul Miller, an American journalist who disconnected from the Internet for a year
  • George Dyson, a historian of the creation and mythology of the digital universe
  • Cathal Gurrin, a computer engineer
  • Laurie Frick, an American artist who turns her personal data into art
  • Liesl Capper, CEO of MyCyberTwin, an AI company that sells virtual human beings
  • Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive

Duration of the In Limbo experience

Approximately 30 minutes, including integration of the user’s personal data

Creative team

Director: Antoine Viviani

Writers: Antoine Viviani, Léa Todorov, Bojina Panayatova

Editors: Pierre-Alain Giraud, Lucas Archambault

Web Designer: Jérôme Pidoux

Front-End Developer: Yves Diffre

Back-End Developer: Maxime Gravouil

An NFB/ARTE France/Providences co-production

NFB

Executive Producer, French Program Digital Studio: Hugues Sweeney

Producer: Louis-Richard Tremblay

ARTE France

Director of the Web Department: Gilles Freissinier

Head of Web Productions and Transmedia Projects: Marianne Lévy-Leblond

Commissioning Editor: Alexander Knetig

Providences

Producer: Antoine Viviani

Production Manager: Émilie Arlet

About Antoine Viviani

French filmmaker and producer Antoine Viviani has made several music documentaries (for REM and Arcade Fire, with music video director Vincent Moon) and worked with video artist Pierre Huyghe. He founded his own production company, Providences, through which he directed his first films: Little Blue Nothing (2009, 52 min); Fugues, a short-film series about classical music; and INSITU, co-produced with ARTE in 2011, a poetic feature-length documentary for the Internet and the cinema about the urban space in Europe, as seen through diverse artistic experiences and public space interventions. It received the DocLab Digital Storytelling Award at IDFA 2011 and the Time Out Best City Film Award at Open City Docs Fest in London in 2012.

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Trailer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb1JGGdm6RE

Photo gallery: onf-nfb.gc.ca/eng/press-room/photo-gallery/

Categories
Digital

Too much data? @timeshighered

In the information age, there’s increasing amounts of data availabe:

Could society be placing too much reliance on the quantity of information at its disposal when it should be equally focused on its accuracy?

subject of a conference on 5th November

The Big Data event at the British Academy, due to take place on 5 November, will assemble academic researchers and statisticians to discuss how best to use the increasingly accessible sets of public data on anything from education to road safety.

Read full story.

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Digital

Data Transparency?

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1227226

Recent data can be hidden, making fact-checking more difficult

The problem is that rapid and pervasive technological advances have changed the game. Although some argue that our unprecedented capacity to acquire, store, manipulate and transmit vast and complex data volumes places us on the verge of a second scientific revolution, it can also serve to make the data on which an argument is based inaccessible.

The evidence underlying a published scientific argument, including the full details of experiments and observations, all the data and an assessment of uncertainties, could once be contained between the covers of a journal article. Mega-, giga- or terabytes of data deny us that option. Fraudulent practice too frequently hides beneath an impenetrable data carapace, so that we need to find new ways of reasserting the historical values of openness. The authors of a Royal Society report, Science as an Open Enterprise, published in June, argue that where the thesis of a scientific paper depends on large data volumes that cannot be reproduced in the paper, the data must be concurrently accessible in a specified database so that other specialists in the same field can test its reproducibility and explore whether the thesis is supported by the data.

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Digital

The British Library and Data

The British Library is rising to the challenges posed by the creative chaos of the digital age, says outgoing chief executive Lynne Brindley

The banking system may have lost public trust, but great libraries such as the British Library, which contain the DNA of civilisation, have the public interest built into their core values.

Those values – which also include independence, integrity and longevity – must be maintained. But as I reflect on my glorious, exciting and rewarding 12 years as chief executive of the British Library, it strikes me that the challenge for such institutions today is to continue to reposition their role in the “always on” digital culture, which submerges scholars, consumers and citizens alike in a deluge of data.

The British Library’s purpose has always been to acquire, preserve, organise and give access to information: the intellectual, scientific and cultural memory of the nation, exercised through statute. Our far-sighted predecessors ensured that any book published in the UK could be made available in a reading room in perpetuity. Today our remit extends into the digital sphere, with prospective regulations set to charge us with avoiding a “digital black hole” in material relating to the 21st century.

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Digital

Everything to Declare (Oxford University)

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1377963

A combination of ‘the information age’, technology and transparency leads to this kind of story:

The University of Oxford has created an online tool for comparing data about its graduates’ careers and salaries. Tucked away on its main careers website and organised into a set of user-friendly tables, it allows immediate comparisons of the salary and employment status of its alumni from 2008-09 and 2009-10 – undergraduate and postgraduate – sorted by subject area, individual course and even constituent college.

A single click of a mouse produces striking information, including a league table of salaries by college, graphics showing the impact that subject choice might have on employment prospects, and even data that indicate how quickly graduates of particular courses might start to pay off their student loans.

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