20

This was originally included in my last entry but it got a little long so I'm posting it separately.

Today I explored the city a little bit with Brittany (and later Simon, but he didn't get to do any of the exploring). We went to the new Apple Store on 14th street, as well as the holiday market at Union Square, but I think my favorite part of the excursion was the New York Times building lobby.


(I felt really uncomfortable taking photos with my ginormous D40...so this is actually from the NYT website)

There is an installation called "Moveable Type" (not to be confused with the blogging/publishing platform, which is "Movable Type" without the "E") where realtime and archived text data associated with the NYTimes is filtered and displayed on each of the screens. The screens all flash content that is unique but themed, like all are sentences that start with a preposition, for a few minutes before moving to a different theme (like numerical statistics, questions, and my favorite, displays of people--online presumably--solving the crossword). It was such a simple and elegant installation that demonstrates the sheer "knowledge" database that the Times has accumulated.

Writing about this, I'm kicking myself for not taking photos. But here are links to some that I managed to find online:

News Flows, Consciousness Streams: The Headwaters of a River of Words
the actual article from the New York Times(a really elaborate title, isn't it)

Moveable Type - installation @ the New York Times building
from Make Magazine

If you want to read the official (I'm guessing? I found it at the NYT Company website) PDF, here it is. It's super short.

Fellow Bruins will be pleased to hear that UCLA Statistics professor Mark Hansen was one of two artists that worked on it. Awesome! He actually has a pretty interesting website: Homepage for Mark Hansen

YAY for crowdsourcing! Is this considered crowdsourcing? Ah, I'm too lazy to look it up.