prosthetic knowledge
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GibraltarpediA
Wikipedia project brings first city to place QR Code plaques around landmarks to provide information about the area, providing virtual tours from it’s encyclopaedic database:
GibraltarpediA is the first Wikipedia project to not only embrace a whole city, but also aspires to bridge two continents. The project aims to cover every single notable place, person, artefact, plant and animals in Gibraltar in as many languages as possible. This is a large WikiProject; it’s at least three times the size of MonmouthpediA. The area of interest includes the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Spanish municipalities along the coast of the Bay of Gibraltar, the northernmost coast of Morocco and Ceuta.
GibraltarpediA uses QRpedia codes, a type of bar code a smartphone can read through its camera (using one of the many free QR readers available) that takes you to a Wikipedia article in your language. QR codes are extremely useful, as physical signs have no way of displaying the same amount of information and in a potentially huge number of languages.
Articles have coordinates (geotags) to allow a virtual tour of the town using Wikipedia’s mobile apps (or the Wikipedia layer on Google Streetview) and are available in augmented reality software including Layar. GibraltarpediA does not use standard black and white QR codes, in order to differentiate between our codes and other schemes and individual’s codes.
FYI - Monmouth became the first Wikipedia town
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The Art of Matthew Troy Mullins
Artist specializes in depicting areas and equipment of knowledge gathering, such as electron microscopes, typewriters and archives.
More of the artist’s work can be seen at his website here
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Breast Cancer Awareness, 1777 (via All My Eyes)
The blog ‘All My Eyes’ takes a historical look at the understanding of breast cancer. The illustrative depictions are far more confrontational than modern awareness campaigns:
As Breast Cancer Awareness Month, aka October, comes to a close I wanted to post this surprising early depiction. I found a number of other early visualizations of the disease, mostly from the 18th and 19th centuries. They are just about all, medical in nature, and are way more graphic than the Maldonado ex voto. And way more horrifying than any Halloween post I could come up with. By the end of October, breast cancer might seem like it’s all pink ribbons and teddy bears, but these pictures can remind us of what all the pink was about to begin with.
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SKIN - Pavilion of Knowledge via AIGA Design Archives
Project brief: An environmental design project developed in partnership with the architect João Luís Carrilho da Graça for a multipurpose room: the foyer of the Pavilion of Knowledge, a science museum in Lisbon. The intention, due to the versatility of space, was to create a texture for a perforated wall with acoustic and lightning purposes.
Approach: The theme, ASCII, is analogous to the museum’s intentions of sharing information. By creating different texture densities with bigger or smaller cuts, acoustic percentages and the openings in the window areas of the rear rooms were controlled. LED white lightning between the wall and the “skin” was balanced with natural light.
Effectiveness: Currently a weekly TV show about new technologies called Talk Global is being recorded on this foyer. The space has been providing a good acoustic and visual experience for these and further approaches.
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How Television Ruined Your Life: Knowledge via douglashaddow
Charlie Brooker dissects television news, educational programs, the moral lessons of He-Man + Thundercats, and televised hoaxes.
Oh, and its funny.
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Hierachy of Visual Understanding?
WIP Maslow-esque chart by David McCandless of Information is Beautiful
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Computer Calculates the Most Boring Day Ever A computer-programmer from Cambridge, William Tunstall-Pedoe, fed a computer program called True Knowledge over 300 million facts about people, places and events that have made the news since 1900. Using algorithms and the information provided, the computer calculated the most boring day ever—a day where no major significant events took place.
So what was this uber-boring day? April 11, 1954. Tunstall-Pedoe reports that nothing of note happened on this day (except a Belgium general election, the birth of a Turkish academic and the death of a footballer).
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Barcodes help objects tell their stories (via New Scientist)
Have you ever come across an unusual object and wanted to know its history? Soon you might simply be able to retrieve the details on your smartphone.
That’s the idea behind a new scheme for creating web pages about physical objects. Its creators say it could change the way we store memories about objects and even places.
The project is based on the concept of the “internet of things” – the idea that physical objects can have an online presence. A simple example of this is a database that keeps track of the stock in a warehouse by listening for signals from the ID chip on each item.
Tales of Things
The Tales of Things website, which goes live this week, aims to take this idea into a new realm. It allows users to create an entry on the site for any object they like. A basic entry features an image and associated text, but audio, video and other content can also be added. The site then generates a unique two-dimensional barcode, known as a QR code, for the user to print off and attach to the object.
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“A Knowmad is continuously busy in an aesthetic engagement that can be seen as the creative act of the self-mapping hyperconnected mind.”
