#kn2
Forum
What happens when massive computing power brings together an ever-growing cross-section of the world’s information in realtime, from news media to social media, books to academic literature, the world’s libraries to the web itself, machine translates all of that material as it arrives, and applies a vast array of algorithms to identify the events and emotions, actors and narratives and their myriad connections that define the planet to create a living silicon replica of global society? The GDELT Project (http://gdeltproject.org/), supported by Alphabet’s Jigsaw (formerly Google Ideas), is the largest open data initiative in the world focusing on cataloging and modeling global human society, offering a first glimpse at what this emerging “big data” understanding of society looks like. Operating the world’s largest open deployments of streaming machine translation, sentiment analysis, geocoding, image analysis and event identification, coupled with perhaps the world’s largest program to catalog local media, the GDELT Project monitors worldwide news media, emphasizing small local outlets, live machine translating all coverage it monitors in 65 languages, flagging mentions of people and organizations, cataloging relevant imagery, video, and social posts, converting textual mentions of location to mappable geographic coordinates, identifying millions of themes and thousands of emotions, extracting over 300 categories of physical events, collaborating with the Internet Archive to preserve online news and making all of this available in a free open data firehose of human society. This is coupled with a massive socio-cultural contextualization dataset codified from more than 21 billion words of academic literature spanning most unclassified US Government publications, the open web, and more than 2,200 journals representing the majority of humanities and social sciences research on Africa and the Middle East over the last half century. The world’s largest open deep learning image cataloging initiative, totaling more than a quarter billion images, inventories the world’s news imagery in realtime, identifying the objects, activities, locations, words and emotions defining the world’s myriad visual narratives and allowing them for the first time to be explored alongside traditional textual narratives. Used by governments, NGOs, scholars, journalists, and ordinary citizens across the world to identify breaking situations, map evolving conflicts, model the undercurrents of unrest, explore the flow of ideas and narratives across borders, and even forecast future unrest, the GDELT Project constructs a realtime global catalog of behavior and beliefs across every country, connecting the world’s information into a single massive ever-evolving realtime network capturing what's happening around the world, what its context is and who's involved, and how the world is feeling about it, every single day. Here’s what it looks like to conduct data analytics at a truly planetary scale and the incredible new insights we gain about the daily heartbeat of our global world and what we can learn about the role of libraries in our big data future.
#kn3
Terrace Room
Stephen Cartwright’s work exists at the confluence of science and art, where hard data intersects with the intangible complexities of human experience. Since 1999 he has recorded his exact latitude, longitude and elevation every hour of every day. Cartwright incorporates his location data and other personally recorded information into his digital and sculptural work. In addition to his latitude and longitude recordings, recent work focuses on constructing landscapes and forms, and analyzing correlations from other self-recorded data.
Stephen Cartwright was born in State College, Pennsylvania in 1972. Cartwright earned a BA in Studio Art from the University of California, Davis and an MFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art in 1998. In 2008 he joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is now an associate professor in the School of Art and Design.
Cartwright has exhibited widely throughout the United States. Recent exhibitions include: Machine Wilderness - The Albuquerque Museum of Art and History; Machinations: Kinetic Sculpture in the Age of Open Source - Columbia College Chicago; Crooked Data: (Mis)information in Contemporary Art - University of Richmond; Human Trajectory - Fermilab National Laboratory. He also frequently discusses his practice at events and academic conferences, recent speaking engagements include: The Quantified Self Conference; The North American Cartographic Information Society Annual Meeting; College Art Association Annual Conference.
