Thoughts on Crowdsourcing

David Bratvold explains what Crowdsourcing is, the various types of crowdsourcing, and the necessity of clear instruction. In the Jimmy Wales TED talk, he explains his motivations for Wikipedia, and his aim to reach the entire world with Wikipedia. He talks about how highly successful it is-how he's able to use a volunteer system, and how the community is mostly complying with the standards of neutrality. He also talks about how he has administration votes for the deletion of fake articles, with litmus tests in regards to accuracy. It is basically using the democracy of hopefully unbiased volunteers to decide the fate of a page.


Aaron Koblin's TED talk examines the implications of monitoring human data. He talks about a crowdsourced music video as a tribute to Johhny Cash with the animations by the people involved.

I think the thing about crowd source data is that it needs an overarching standard to make it work. Without clear instructions or an obvious vision, individual components can falter.

Credit: The Standing O-An Obama Honoring Crowdsourced Gif Mosiac

The First Materials

The Wikipedia article on Synesthesia was interesting in how it branched out on the types of synesthesia. Grapheme-color synesthesia  (numbers and letters having individual colors) being the most prominent form of it. Chromesthesia is the association of aural components with colors.

More forms are presented but I will not talk about them. It is not considered a disability, because it is not consider to impair the livelihood of people who have it.
What struck me as interesting is how synesthesia is used in art and music, and how there is a presents of the blending of the senses.
The TED talks were interesting as well. Cymatics incorporates sound data and their shapes and can be used for scientific exploration.
Daniel Tammet's talk was interesting in how it shows the role of synesthesia in art, language, and
 mathematics. He gives an illustration on how the word 'hare' gives a sad pictorial quality of vulnerability.

 The short we watched in the first class Monday had a cymatic quality. The animated strings responded
 to the music, and there was a sense of intensity to the red and green color pallette.

The idea of cross-sensory perception is interesting, because it is atypical but not "wrong,"

In other words, it isn't a distortion of reality, but a viable experience with reality that few people possess. Food for thought, indeed.

1rst Post Assignment

I was assigned to write a sentence based of a Brachage-esque musical fantasia on film. Mainly, the combination of animation and music.

This is what I wrote:

"Sound vibrations show up as shapes. Has a very Brachage feel.
Colors have a faded quality. The use of [animated] circles (marbles?) to break up the shots of lines are interesting. The lines have a stringed instrument quality. Lots of red and green. I enjoyed the music but  felt no emotion during the viewing."

For class we had to basically mess around with an existing 16mm film using razors, sandpaper, and markers, scratching and defacing the emulsion layer. I hope to do more in the future, though I accidently spliced the movie with the old splicer the wrong way. I'll probably have to resplice the footage. It was great to see new images be placed in a 60 year old military-grade projector.  I think I'm gonna like this class.

- John