Let all be well, be well.

Posted on May 8, 2016 by Antonio Vantaggiato

The first installment of the new Penny Dreadful Victorian video feuilleton provides more than a strong poetic moment. The occasion of the death of Tennyson is one not missed by Vanessa, to recite, entranced these beautiful, potent verses from Maud:

Beat, happy stars, timing with things below,

Beat with my heart more blest than heart can tell,

Blest, but for some dark undercurrent woe

That seems to draw—but it shall not be so:

Let all be well, be well.

[Extract from Maud: ‘I have led her home, my love, my only friend’ [Part I, xviii] (See full text.)]

Animated GIF of Vanessa from Penny Dreadful

Animated GIF from http://penydreadful.tumblr.com

And there we are, in a vertiginous mixing of Dr. Frankenstein (and his creatures) with Dorian Gray, and other literary characters, including Count Dracula, a werewolf and of course, demons. I actually love the progression of the “Know Thyself/Master Your Demons” mantra from Dexter on to Penny Dreadful.

Of course, when I searched for the poet’s verses I found them on the Network, and I also found a plethora of other stuff: from blogs with critiques of the episode (in English, Spanish and Italian) to official Web page from Showtime and the YouTube channel.

I also found a nice fan page of the above animated GIF with the splendid Eva/Vanessa declaims that last verse:

Let all be well, be well.

What I haven’t been able to find–neither online nor in my university’s own library– is a Spanish or Italian translation of Maud. It seems as if it exists not. Possible?

In any case, the full first episode of this third season is all on YouTube, so you may want to indulge.

And so be it, then, once again thankful of the riches lurking in the remixing dwellings of web demons who pirate, mix and openly share their penny-worth jewels.

[Featured Image (animated GIF) by  http://penydreadful.tumblr.com]

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Viral First Kiss and Buying Love

Posted on May 7, 2016 by Antonio Vantaggiato

The powerful idea of “the First something” (first kiss, first time into a city, whatever) and the power of “image” vs reality. Convince people you sell love, not the products you actually produce. This is after all the genius [sic] idea behind most marketing.

Now Knorr has done it and it at par with Coca-Cola and similia. This campaign is called “Love at first taste” and I think the idea is pretty powerful. Now, it won’t convert the famous little cubes into people’s happiness-inducing stock but it tries hard. Of course, the target here is not wild youngsters who like being together, but instead all us in the intimacy of one’s kitchen. Hence, intimacy triggers love. The genius work is always convincing people to associate an idea to the product.

Now, talking about love, this next one is but another viral video based on the same idea of something genuinely happening for the first time; something, of course that arises our ancestral curiosity and fascination. We the targets are always a bit voyeurs.

See the joy and hunger of these first kisses. Hey, first kisses are a basic human right, right? It’s fascinating to see how social inhibitions get dissolved once there is the “excuse” of an arts project.

First Kiss, a film by Tatia Pilieva. In this film, the director “asked twenty strangers to kiss for the first time….”

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“Give anyone the power to share anything with anyone.”

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Antonio Vantaggiato
Image of Mark Zuckerberg and a big title:

Image by Eric Risberg/Associated Press from The New York Times The Unstoppable Facebook.

**Give anyone the power to share anything with anyone.**

That’s what the (open) Web does, Mr. Zuck.

And yes, this is but another hint at the FB issue: Conquering the Web. FB is in fact becoming the Web for something like a billion people on Earth. And growing. Why the inconvenience of Googling a Web address (URL anyone?) if you can have it without leaving FB?

Why the inconvenience of opening the actual, fresh, rich webpage of a newspaper, if you can have it condensed within FB? Moreover, you won’t read the things you dislike. And you won’t have those evil links that distract you into going away from the (monetized) page.

Zuck and FB are the new Web, and lest we don’t preserve it, the Web will be over–at least in the version we love. Zuck’s Internet.org project is but a shameful act of putting up a free portal for everybody, except you get to it through FB, and this way you contribute–as poor as you may be– to each cent coming in to enrich the lords of this machinery. Which is a lot. I read (“How much money did you make for facebook last year“, Quarz.com) that each FB user gets them $11.96. Multiply this by 1+ billion, and you get the outstanding revenue amount of $18,000,000,000 for last year. Of course, our eyeing its page is valued much more in the US than in Asia, some 8 times more, actually. So, the question is not really about FB making all that money, but that in doing that they are closing the Web and making it another thing. What I find worrisome is that they do so while we applaud happily liking cats and babies. In another post I will look into the tunnel effect typical of platforms like FB: Even though you may subscribe to a variety of pages or even newspaper throughb FB, it is their algorithm that decides what you will stumble upon in your timeline, and not you. Also, beyond your loss of control

is the shrinking of scope: You do lose those articles at the periphery of your interests or those that are adverse to your opinions. But we leave that to another post. You know something? I wonder why we are still so attached to the ad-based revenue model and haven’t been able to come up with another business model to sustain income?

But last, I think FB is being a bit hypocritical when they say

Give anyone the power to share anything with anyone.

Because this is a slogan: The Web was born and is built to do precisely that. But FB is the Web for many, and that’s the issue.

BTW, in doing this post I found this nice graph of FB’s revenues per user and I so discovered a gorgeous repository of data visualizations: Atlas. Check it!

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Sentiment data from Twitter and Google Trends

Posted on April 18, 2016 by Antonio Vantaggiato

Great day of class, last Wednesday. It deserves a short summary, which I am publishing here. The basic idea for the class was the exploration of sentiments around a place, using Twitter.

First I showed my students that Twitter admits a pretty advanced set of search options. Among the most useful is the Geocode options, which gives the coordinates for a certain geographic point. Then Twitter will search for all Tweets that were issued from that geolocation. If you need to know your geolocation, just ask https://whereamirightnow.com. If you want to know the coordinates of any place on Earth, just ask Google Maps. At this moment I am at a computing lab, here:

Latitude:18.466334°
Longitude:-66.105722°

Then, to do the search it’s enough to go to search.twitter.com and enter the following:

geocode:18.466334,-66.105722,0.5km

The third parameter represents the radius of the search circle around the indicated location, in this case 0.5 km.

This way, one can search whatever idea on Twitter around a given place. For instance, we could query all tweets containing the words “Sagrado” or “Universidad” or “estudiar” around those coordinates; and we can even exclude retweets. Like this:

-RT Sagrado OR Universidad
OR estudiar geocode:18.466334,-66.105722,0.5km

Try it here.

Twitter has got also a powerful API that can be used programmatically, so one can design a pretty great program that do sentiment analysis in Python and see what happens!

Of course, I showed students where all this savvy comes from! Here: http://thoughtfaucet.com/search-twitter-by-location/examples/

The Twitter search brought us later to Twistori, the wonderful tool that shows all Tweets in the world displaying a certain word in their text: love, hate, wish, think, etc. Like in the following video:

I love Twistori, and it also comes with a Mac screensaver!

 

After Twistori, a stop at Google Trends was de rigueur. We discussed how to get data on epidemics, or brands, or political issues. G-Trends display great graphs of the data, too.

<<Examples>>

This is the Google Trends search for zika, chikungunya and dengue viruses. We discussed how, exactly as with the Twitter data, one can query and analyze data that may shed light on possible epidemics. And, if we project the term “epidemic” to something that is socially spreading in the same fashion as a biological infection, we can have interesting results by geo-limiting the search to a specific region, all of which is easily done with Google Trends.

And this is the world map corresponding to the same data.

Note that oddity that Serbia, of all European nations, is seemingly very much interested in zika.

Last thing I did was to  inform student we have an interview set with the great Dolors Reig for next Monday, May 2nd at 9:40am, live from Barcelona! Dolors is the champion of the famous blogsite El Caparazón and she tweets as @dreig.

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Serial series

Posted on March 31, 2016 by Antonio Vantaggiato

Pardon my slightly redundant title. “Serial”, or.. series, wonderful series.

We are quite surrounded by TV series. Everywhere. Even on the Web, recently a few television-like series have appeared with a lot of success. Actually, calling them “television-like” is an error; these series are not TV, use multimedia and the Web, and have quite different writing and production cycles from classic TV shows. They are usually low-budget, lo-tech microformats. One, quite intriguing actually, is Shieldfive, the first series being broadcast exclusively on Instagram. Appearing every day on Instagram with 28 episodes of only 15 seconds each. Moreover, each episodes cycles infinitely, so one has good opportunities to fully grasp it. I think the series phenomenon has established a golden age for TV and has spun off a number of new formats that are creative and almost avant-garde beautiful, impacting storytelling.

—

In class, last Wednesday, we shared the world of Serial, a professionally produced podcast series now at its second season. The beauty of Serial is that the story is intriguing and you get absorbed by it almost immediately. You are brought back to ol’ radio days when you begin to imagine faces and landscapes, accurately described in words and sounds. The podcast format allows one to subscribe and get each episode through RSS feeds with one of many apps for every platform. Like with all podcasts, one can download an episode and then enjoy it offline when walking or driving.

Thus, we shared the world of Serial and we listened to its whole first episode. There were few students, sadly. And of those, I saw quite a few yawns. True, it’s a medium we’re completely not used to. Even if we may enjoy radio shows, this one is a format so different that it puts a listener off-guard. I proposed to follow the transcript while we were listening, because we could then 1) more easily understand what was being told, and 2) get more easily immersed in the story, btw, a well-known story. In fact, there was no transcript for season one (which I haven’t listened to), and, as said earlier, I believe this affordance gives all an invaluable degree of immersion.

In May 2014, a U.S. Special Operations team in a Black Hawk helicopter landed in the hills of Afghanistan. Waiting for them were more than a dozen Taliban fighters and a tall American, who looked pale and out of sorts: Bowe Bergdahl. Bergdahl, a U.S. soldier, had been a prisoner of the Taliban for nearly five years, and now he was going home.

 

Also, each chapter does not stop at the story being told. Each episode is complemented by maps, extra info, etc. So, it’s a full immersive environment for storytelling, and one that cost a number of production hours and dollars.

Serial podcast: Season 2, episode 1.

Serial podcast: Season 2, episode 1.

I enjoyed it. And I hope we’ll watch listen at least to a couple episode more on our own. It’s a good exercise: at the end, let’s each post our ideas and reflections on the experience, through our blogs.

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How Do I Get A Podcast?  << READ here!!

 

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