Computing Culture

Urban noise pollution has been a problem since the days of Buddha. Walkmans help, but issues of both social and accoustic isolation have become more urgent with the popularity of the iPod. Addressing these issues may require a look at how recorded music devices work at a fundamental level. Ambient Addition is a Walkman-like device, built on a DSP core, that synthesizes music by sampling the sound around the listener, creating harmony and rhythm from the chaos and noise of the environment. By simultaneously opening music to incorporate the environment, but also turning the environment into music, the sound stays fresh and the listener is encouraged to explore new territory.

Our bodies continue beyond our flesh and bones. Humans have constantly augmented their bodies with tools like clothing or automobiles, and now our bodies also extend into virtual space. An identity includes online identity, which extends from cell phones and laptops into cyberspace. How do we regard our selves when the boundary between self and world is fading? Caché is a project that aims to extend online gaze into real space. When a photograph of a body is viewed online, it manifests the gaze offline by means of sound localized on the body. Users know exactly when and where they are being seen. How does revealing online activity affect wearers? If data is neutral and equally accessible, how do we distinguish between personal space and neutral grounds?

By providing advanced information technologies and mediated social networks, we hope to allow communities to build a representation of and monitor an extractive industry's practices. We are developing an innovative form of community collaboration to monitor and respond to environmental health hazards. Energy production has significant—if often elusive—health, environmental, and social consequences. This project attempts to create an innovative information and coordination mechanism to map those consequences, via Web-based tools and other forms of media and communication. These tools will be distributed through communities in Colorado, allowing community members to generate collaboratively an interactive map of regional gas development by recording the observable practices of local gas development, from the location of waste material pits, to reported health problems and pollution events. The action map would ultimately amplify the force with which landowners and industry workers can collectively influence gas development policies through negotiation, regulation, legislation, or litigation.

Are electronic instruments that generate their own power better than those that don't? Can the movement of the sound generation be tightly coupled to the power generation, as opposed to merely modulating a large power reserve, as in traditional instruments? What useful musical artifacts/affordances can be created through this technology? Can acoustic and electronic musical instruments be successfully merged?

ExtrAct, a set of Internet-based databasing, mapping, and communications technologies for communities impacted by natural gas development, is a novel platform for community education and civic action. Its objective is to create and distribute open-source, Web-based tools for mapping, analyzing, and intervening in this industry based on supplementing data obtained from state and federal agencies with user-generated reports, complaints, and experiences. All of these tools, though accessible individually, will share information through a unified database. Given that these tools will be serving both urban and rural populations, we are also developing innovative paper and phone interfaces to the Web services. To develop these tools we are working with a network of lawyers, citizen’s alliances, national activist organizations, and environmental health experts in Colorado, New Mexico, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Texas.

GoodApp is a cloud environment for the community development of socially responsible and transparent Web applications. It provides a shared infrastructure and pedagogy for the development of civic or "good" apps. This infrastructure includes educational components, developmental tools (editing, collaboration, versioning, and visualization), and simple mechanisms for deployment. Conceptually, we seek to understand the technical similarities of, and the sustainability challenges for, civic applications.

GroundTruth is a dynamic online map of changing topographic structures (roads, checkpoints, barriers, and settlements) and human narratives in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. This community-driven map is populated with multiple data layers collected by human-rights organizations and a network of informed inhabitants. This community and crisis mapping effort aims to unite disparate datasets and provide a more comprehensive picture of changing restrictions and events. We believe this “ground truth,” correlating spatial mapping with daily human experience, is crucial to understanding the changing nature of the occupation and enabling cooperative action by organizations and individuals in the region.

Landman Report Card is the first in a suite of applications designed to help communities affected by extractive industries to recognize, report, and act on their interests. LRC allows landowners to document, discuss, and rate their experiences with landmen, the professional negotiators who work for oil and gas companies. We are currently deploying the application in communities in several states in the US.

NPS is a way to archive and share your news geographically. Through NPS you can create a shared archive of news, as well as represent that archive on a searchable map. You can choose to share your news only with your group, or with the public in general. Location matters when sharing news, and NPS can be used to find out about news in your area.

RedInk is personal finance software with a social conscience. The Website provides constituencies with tools to collectively measure the effect of their economic power as it relates to specific industries and businesses, while maintaining privacy for individual users. Up until now, accounting of this nature has been vague or unavailable. More accurate spending data will be a valuable lever for organizations involved in collective action, collective bargaining, and fundraising.

Selectricity (formerly HyperChad) is a Web-based voting system that supports anonymous and voter-verifiable balloting, and includes an election-methods library that implements a variety of election techniques, including several preferential systems. Unlike most voting projects, Selectricity does not attempt to address the issues raised in mainstream political elections. Instead, it provides a simple set of tools that small groups and organizations can use to incorporate computationally complex decision-making into new areas, and for purposes where they ordinarily would find such decision-making prohibitively complex. By supporting a variety of election methods, it provides a way for users to explore and compare the effects of different voting systems and, ultimately, come to better decisions.

Virtual Gaza is a space where ordinary Palestinians under siege can describe their experiences in their own words, and where the destruction of the Gaza strip can be documented by those experiencing it directly. The diary entries, photographs, and video material gathered have been contributed by residents of Gaza.

Tasers are an electroshock weapon used by over 12,000 police agencies in the United States. The military recently completed testing on another less-lethal weapon which uses a 95GHz millimeter-wave transmitter, called the pain ray. The stated purpose of these less-lethal weapons is as an alternative to firearms, but in practice this hasn't been the case. Some police departments allow taser use in cases of passive resistance, refusing verbal commands, or civil disobedience. Their deployment is now routine and open to misuse. When a gun is fired, the shot is heard and the bullet can be found as evidence. Electronic weapons leave no such traces: they don't leave the telltale markings of traditional physical force, but their electronic signatures are evident in their electromagnetic frequencies and induced body currents. This research focuses on developing tools to sense and identify when these weapons are being used and document that evidence.