ATC@UCB:
Listening Post: Rendering the evolving landscape of online public discourse
(or, a statistician, an artist and 200,000 complete strangers)
Mark Hansen
UCLA, Dept of Statistics
The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium
Mon, 25 August, 7:30-9:30pm: UC Berkeley,
Location: 160 Kroeber Hall
All ATC Lectures are free and open to the public.
Listening Post, a collaboration between Hansen and NY artist Ben
Rubin, is an award winning multimedia art installation designed to
convey the magnitude and diversity of online communication. Exhibited
at the Whitney Museum of American Art, December 2002 through March
2003, Listening Post provides a meaningful rendering of a massive data
stream consisting of thousands of simultaneous Internet-based
conversations. The visual centerpiece of Listening Post is a
suspended, curved grid of more than two hundred small screens. These
screens display fragments of text that are continuously gathered in
real time from unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and
other forums. The work is structured as a sequence of "scenes," each
of which organizes incoming communications according to different
statistical criteria. Mirroring the fluidity and dynamism of the
Internet itself, topics emerge and change from day to day, hour to
hour. A coordinated audio component underscores the content presented
on the screens, layering algorithmically generated musical
compositions with the vocalization of captured messages, spoken by a
text-to-speech system.
The technical challenges implied here are considerable; from "frugal"
monitoring agents that continually recognize and cull new content, to
statistical natural language processing and dynamic clustering schemes
that allow us to track topics and extract representative phrases. In
this talk, I will describe how our work has evolved, starting with our
early experiments with pure sonification of Web traffic. Hansen
will emphasize the interplay between data analysis and design, between
modeling and expression and end with their most recent project, a
public art commission involving a live data feed from Google's news
service.
–
Mark Hansen is currently Associate Professor of Statistics at UCLA,
where he also has an appointment in the Design|Media Art
Department. Previously he was a member of the Technical Staff in the
Statistics and Data Mining Research Department of Bell Laboratories.
Mark will give a related talk in the Neyman Seminar in Berkeley's
Statistics Department on Wednesday August 27, 4-5pm, in 1011 Evans.
http://www.stat.ucla.edu/~cocteau
http://www.earstudio.com/projects/listeningpost.html
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The ATC Colloquium continues our partnership with the Berkeley Art
Museum to present online video of ATC talks, available both in
QuickTime (highlights) or MP3 audio. For links and the full 2003-2004
series schedule, please see:
http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/lecs/
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ATC Monday 7:30pm: Mark Hansen
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Type: discussion