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Data Visualization with Eric Rodenbeck

Eric Rodenbeck is in the business of finding new ways to depict data. He insists that data visualization is a medium, not a technology or methodology. Stamen, the technology and design studio he founded in 2001, is currently working on various projects that seek to bring data visualization to practical usage. In the video above, he describes three of those projects.

Rodenbeck uses live data, continually being updated, to create his visualizations. Take, Flickr. Approximately 40% of the tags on Flickr at location-based, but they are scattered, without a set organization. Where the average user thinks of photos and tags, Rodenbeck thinks of connectors and taxonomy. His project maps photos for users.

A second project, Cabspotting, was commissioned by the Exploratorium in San Francisco. It tracks the routes of Yellow Cab city taxes. Because of the company uses GPS to track their cabs around the city, Rodenbeck is able to record the location and routes of the cars in real time, showing the cars that are moving, crossing a bridge, have passengers inside them, and how long they’ve had them.

A third project, for Trulia, a real estate aggregation firm in San Francisco, shows information about properties around the United States. In the map, users can see which neighborhoods are rising and falling in price, the date when houses were built, how many bedrooms they have, and a wealth of other information useful to consumers.

Just because something can be documented does not mean it should be, and many may argue that cabs continually being tracked are actually cab drivers continuously being monitored. On the website dedicated to Cabspotting, the folks at Stamen address the privacy questions that arise from this project and invites people to provide “comments and suggestions on how to restrict the system to a benevolent use of the data.” Rodenbeck himself says this new technology is not meant to answer any questions—a recurring argument among Postopolis! presenters—but to make questions more specific.

About the presenter
Eric Rodenbeck is the founder and creative director of Stamen, a design and technology firm based in San Francisco. He studied architecture at Cooper Union and holds a B.A. in History and Philosophy of Technology from The New School for Social Research

Alexandra Lerman is the founder of SMAC: ScribeMedia Arts and Culture. She is also a video artist and a documentary filmmaker.