Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Collaboration and cyberspace: new class at Stanford

Howard Rheingold is assembling a team for a class on human cooperation at Stanford's Humanities Laboratory, starting this February.   It's an interdisciplinary, cutting-edge seminar, and should be fascinating. Learning how we cooperate is definitely a vital concern in this age.

Blogging murder

A Livejournal blogger posts a widely-noted going-away message, with a matricidal hint:

Just to let everyone know, my mother was murdered
I won’t have computer acess (sic) until the weekend or so because the police took my computer to go through the hard drive. I thank everyone for their thoughts and e-mails, I hope to talk to you when I get my computer back.
(copy at Glassdog)

Another haunted space narrative, but perhaps deathblogs are a rising new trend.

(edited to add) Just-launched WikiNews has an article on this, now.

Augmented cities: Yellow Arrow

YellowArrow has a video of samples.  This project connects the placement of big yellow arrows, which point at something, to a Web site, which can describe what they're pointing at.

(via MajorFun)

10x10 does Daypop

10x10 offers a visualization tool similar to Daypop's Wordbursts.  The site populates a matrix with iconic images associated with 100 leading words from several RSS-feeding news sites, leading to a graphic snapshot of the world mediated through keywords.

Longtime Infocult readers may remember our previous obsession with keyword-focused Daypop Wordbursts.
(thanks to Zach Chandler!)

A new numbers radio story

NPR has a story on numbers radio.  Short, but has nice details, including the oral transmission aspect, and some nice sound samples.
(thanks to Tony Frederick)

Where is the film of Northanger Abbey?

A Gothic curiosity: why aren't there more movies of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1803), a fine parody of the Gothic genre?  I can find one from 1986, but nothing since the current spate of Austencinema has taken off.  Given the brevity of the text, perhaps this is a project waiting to be done by some desktop filmmakers.

Spaces without characters

The White Room offers ominous, depopulated spaces. These were made using the game Max Payne 2, so it's a form of machinima:

By transforming the game environment into a ready-made urban studio space, the objects and interiors were altered using the in-game weapons with the gore from dead enemies being used to 'paint' the sets before being unceremoniously blasted out of view and the scene captured.

(via Boingboing)

Another election map site

Returning to our earlier explorations of information design in American election mapping, here is a popular and good page-length consideration from the University of Michigan, which maps population onto size:

Augmented reality and a hint of Bradbury

Savannah is an early educational augmented reality project:

Savannah is a strategy-based adventure game where a virtual space is mapped directly onto a real space. Children ‘play’ at being lions in a savannah, navigating the augmented environments with a mobile handheld device.

A shiver of literary recognition: does any remember Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt" (1951)?

(via Smartmobs)

Narrative by stickers

As part of Infocult's continued examination into new narrative materials and forms, consider Implementation, a novel described by stickers.  Placed largely in urban areas, as far as I can tell.