Mapping Wikipedia is a groundbreaking visualisation of the world mapped according to articles in 7 different languages. The map displays both the global patterns and the vast number of geo-located items. The dataset was produced by the Oxford Internet Institute as part of a project that examines Wikipedia in the Middle East and North Africa.
Monthly Archives: April 2012
Death to Word
Desktop publishing has given way to laptop or smartphone publishing. And Microsoft Word is an atrocious tool for Web writing. Its document-formatting mission means that every piece of text it creates is thickly wrapped in metadata, layer on layer of invisible, unnecessary instructions about how the words should look on paper.
Slate Magazine: Microsoft Word is cumbersome, inefficient, and obsolete. It’s time for it to die.
Pentametron
Pentametron, my twitter poetry engine, is now online! An experiment in finding inadvertent art in the internet’s endless outpouring of language, pentametron automatically collects twitter posts that happen to be in iambic pentameter. It processes about five million tweets per day, and finds a few dozen iambic lines in that time.
Moonmilk: With algorithms subtle and discreet, I seek iambic writings to retweet
Jeremy Deller: Joy in People
Jeremy Deller does art outside galleries. It thrives in ‘low culture’ and it is usually ambitious, socially-engaged and unexpected. Indeed, most of his career is built on looking for art in the most unpredictable places, working with the public or with people who have particular knowledge or skill but who wouldn’t otherwise be associated with the contemporary art world. They include unemployed miners, brass bands, a campaign banner maker, fans of Depeche Mode, a glam rock wrestler, experts in battle re-enactments, etc. He even collaborated on an art project with nightclub owner and trendsetter Peter Stringfellow.
In late February, a retrospective of Jeremy Deller’s work opened at the Hayward gallery. It is called Joy in People and joy is precisely what it brings.
Starbucks embark on store refresh ahead of the Olympics
Prolific coffee chain Starbucks has announced it intends to revamp its network of cafes to coincide with the Olympics and Queen’s Jubilee this summer, commencing with the chain’s 70 London outlets.
This will attempt to move away from the standardised approach taken thus far to pursue individually designed stores that fit in with their local neighbourhoods.
The Drum: Starbucks embark on store refresh ahead of the Olympics