Mixing and Remixing Information: Open House
Final student projects from INFO 290: Mixing and Remixing Information
At the Open House, students will be presenting their semester-long projects, which all reuse or recombine information to create something new. We will be setting up the room for poster-style presentations. Light refreshments will be served. Please feel free to drop by anytime during the hour to see some demos and talk to the students. We think that you'll be impressed by the imagination and hard work of the projects.
For more information, please contact feel contact course instructor Raymond Yee.Student Projects
Ten student projects will be presented:
DinnerAndMovie
Ruchi Kumar and Anuradha Roy
John wants to take Amy out for a date. Amy stays in downtown San Francisco whereas John lives in San Jose. He wants the location for the date to be close to Amy’s residence. However, he has no idea about the movie and dinner options in that geographical area. Here is where the DinnerAndMovie application comes in. John can input a zipcode into the application and see the dining and movie options superimposed on a Google Map. The place marks for dinner options are shown in a different color than those for movie options, facilitating better visualization of the information. Further, faceted navigation is provided for choosing multiple ways of showing relevant data on the map.
gCalWeather
Bryan Tsao and Jimmy Chen
gCalWeather is a mashup of Google Calendar and the National Weather Service database that will allow Google Calendar users to receive embedded location and time specific weather information for events in their calendar. Users need only to sign up for our service through our web interface and enter location information in their Google Calendar events to receive updated weather info.. While current widgets allow users to see daily weather information for one location, our application will be more useful, as temperatures often vary by over 20 degrees Farenheit of the course of a day, and people often spend different parts of their day in different places.
This application will be particularly useful for recurring events, such as classes at school or outdoor activities like intramural sports, as users will only have to enter location information once.
geoYoutube
Michael Lee, Xiaomeng Zhong
Youtube is arguably the most popular video streaming website on the Internet with millions of users coming to view and contribute videos every day. With more and more information being added daily, sorting through these videos to find specific ones of interest becomes a chore.
Our project aims to design a tool to help users identify videos that matter to them in a new way. We are mashing up Youtube data with another highly popular online tool – Google Maps. This will allow users to find and sort information that is more relevant to the geographic area they are interested in exploring – giving them an additional layer on top of “tag”-searching to find videos.
With the newly added support for geo-location data in the Google and Youtube APIs, we foresee an increase in contributions from mobile devices with GPS coordinates. By creating a tool that exploits these new data sets early, we hope to understand how users will utilize these new features and explore how other tools will use this information.
Nujj Nudge
Alana Pechon and Bindiya Jadhwani
Our project is aimed at providing an easy way for people to store information about the places that interest them, as well as share that information with their friends. People often browse the web and bookmark places of interest to them, but these bookmarks live in the browser, and are of little use when actually moving around town. Our system will provide an easy way to send locations of interest, along with a small note or comment, to a location-enabled service that will interact with the user’s mobile device. It will also provide an easy way for the user to view all of these “placemarks” at one time on one map, regardless of the source of the information.
HistoryVis
Nick Rabinowitz, Hazel Onsrud, and Jon Breitbart
The HistoryVis project will be an online educational tool to display a map and timeline of ancient history in the Mediterranean region. We are working with a professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin to create a prototype for this tool using an initial historical dataset that will be expanded next year. To support this application, we are creating a set of flexible tools to integrate a JavaScript-based map and timeline visualization with the Drupal content management system in order to implement a easy-to-use platform for the production and display of geolocated historical datasets.
SLickr: Bringing Flickr into Second Life
Shawna Hein and Aylin Selcukoglu
Our project is in collaboration with Remixing Çatalhöyük, the UC Berkeley Archeology Research Facility, and Open Knowledge and the Public Interest (OKAPI).
The Remixing Çatalhöyük team hopes to develop biographies of excavated places and immerse people in the life histories of the people, places, and things of the past. As part of their outreach program, they have created a virtual 3D representation of Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic farming community that flourished from 9,400 until 7,700 years ago, in Second Life.
Second Life residents can explore the dig site as it exists today and as it may have looked in the past, interact with recreated objects like furniture and ovens, and remix the available content on the publicly accessible island. Photos would greatly enhance this Second Life experience; however, no way currently exists for residents to access photostreams in Second Life. The only method Second Life provides is an “upload photo” option, which takes a lot of time and effort, costs a certain amount in Linden dollars per photo, and limits the ability for dynamic and collaborative photo sharing.
Our project creates a way for the Remixing Çatalhöyük team to integrate their Flickr photostream into their island in Second Life. This integration is free and involves no manual “uploading” of photos. These photos are easily accessible to the public, either by specific tags, user names, photo pools, or a combination of these. Additionally, our project allows the public to more easily contribute their photos to the Çatalhöyük project, either by adding a specific tag to their photo or placing the photo in a specified pool. Our mashup will be open source, ensuring that it will not only benefit the Okapi Remixing Çatalhöyük project but will also be freely available for other museums and universities to use and even extend to suit their individual needs.
Song Cloud
Kevin Mateo Lim, Yiming Liu, and Hannes Hesse
Our project is called Song Cloud, which is an exploration of song similarity. In an old car like mine, the music is arranged in this arbitrary way (radio stations at different frequencies), but the interface to those songs is compelling: a dial. We want to make the related song information, which is spread out all over the web, a more unified and compelling experience, across more dimensions.
A Timemap of the Amazon
Ashkan Soltani
Amazonwatch works with indigenous and environmental organizations in the Amazon Basin to defend the environment and advance indigenous peoples’ rights in the face of large-scale industrial development-oil and gas pipelines, power lines, roads, and other mega-projects.
This time map is a visualization of press and news events generated by Amazonwatch which relate to ongoing campaigns operating in the amazon basin. This should help visitors have a better idea of the time and space in which these projects operate.
UC Berkeley Admissions Office Geomapper
John Ward
After the UC Berkeley Office of Undergraduate Admissions has selected a new class of students, it has the task of planning recruitment efforts. Such efforts include visiting high schools and planning small receptions for newly admitted students at the homes of alumni. The goal of the UC Berkeley Admissions Office Geomapper is facilitate these efforts by providing visualizations on a map of high schools and of newly admitted students. By seeing where schools are in relation to one another, the admissions office can better plan school visits. To aid in the planning of receptions at homes of alumni, the application displays on a map admitted students living within specific distances, for example, 10 miles, of an alumnus or alumna.
Event Planner for Concert Goers
Travis Pinnick
The interface I am designing is an event-planning web service tool for concert-goers which, given a particular music venue, will locate nearby bars and restaurants which might also be of interest, aggregate their descriptions, and place them on a map.
The three primary sources for this project are:
- Eventful (venue locator)
- Yahoo local (venue descriptions)
- Google Maps (map output)