FRICTION

“So you dig into the history of data. You fight metadata friction, the difficulty of recovering contextual knowledge about old records.” – Without historical data there would be no data today.

To begin: Aggregation is the constituting or amounting to a whole; total- bringing things together

Distribution is the opposite of aggregation but put in words: the act of dispersing

The reading entitled A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming is about how Edwards is trying to aggregate the arguments and models of climate change into one source.

The reading offered more or less a timeline of how scientists learnt to understand the environment- and from this then- how different models for data analysis of climate change have progressed and changed and importantly what these changes mean in developing our understanding of information.

Edwards says the Infrastructural Globalism needs socio technical systems that produce knowledge about the whole world. However Global Data needs multiple images to replicate change as one image is not useful in demonstrating a theory as big as Global Warming.

Aggregation is used to analyse information efficiently. Scientific models are the best way, (Edward) to predict the future impacts of changes. Without models, would the data really exist?

Statistics are thus used in models. It is here that frictional data can be observed.

It is data friction because it is close to impossible to term something a ‘fact’ when talking about global warming. There are so many representations of data and models that they over-lap and contradict each other.

Within climate change, there are two sides to the story. Some say it’s happening, some say it’s not. If we were to go back to the original data they used to make these suggestions, there would probably be a debate then about what a certain statistic means – because your views will be based on data you have seen before that, and before that, and before that….etc.

In my own personal views of aggregation, I find it interesting to think how the creation of a hash tag is formed. When I hash tag something on instagram, it’s been done a million times before. To some people, the hash tag has different meanings. For example I hash tagged ‘billgates’ the other day. When I view the global hash tags for Bill Gates, it’s anything from a computer to a dog wearing glasses.

I guess after reading the Edwards article it made me realize that you own interpretation of data is always going to be what you base your future interpretations of data on.

Visual

This week’s topic of ‘making the invisible visible’ was truly incredible, even the title gets you thinking. I had never thought about how many visual signs I ‘take for granted’ or I just know/recognise daily.

One of the examples Andrew used which struck me was ‘the dashed line’. I studied Industrial Design for one year and had to do copious amounts of technical drawings. These drawings aren’t easy; they take hours and are incredibly detailed. They end up looking something like an architectural drawing, but for a product not a building. As the drawings are done in black and white with a pen, you have to show many different kinds of details with line thickness and dashed lines. When I was learning how to do these drawings, I just took those rules for what they were and got on with it. I never thought how people just somehow knew what each line represented. It’s kind of like speaking another language.

If we look at the art of VJ-ing, we see another way in which something intangible can be physically seen. “VJs,” as they are called, employ the use of images and visuals, which are synchronized with and/or respond to their music. It’s like you can see music. But isn’t the performing arts way ahead of VJing? In my opinion ballet was way ahead of its time.

Visualisation can never replace firm facts or extensive data, they should only exist to complement the data and make it more manageable. I don’t think visualisation should replace the text, are we so lazy we have to have everything drawn out for us?

A quote from the reading ‘The Virtual Window Interactive” saying “how the world is framed may be as important as what is contained within that frame,” I thought was brilliant. Very abstract but here it is anyway – everything is about perception.