Giles Lane

Month: January 2015

  • Magna Carta 800

    Magna Carta 800

    800 years ago on June 19th 1215 King John was forced, by Archbishop Stephan Langton and a group of barons, to sign the Magna Carta – a document setting out limits to the king’s power and guaranteeing the pre-eminence of the rule of law over the executive. John almost immediately repudiated it, but over the next 80 years or so it was re-issued several times, with the 1297 version extending the freedoms it offered to free men across the land. Alongside Magna Carta (and the 1217 Charter of the Forest, or Little Charter) the 13th Century in England featured the calling of the first English Parliament and with it the establishment of the foundations of modern democracy and a just and fair society.

    To celebrate the events at Runnymede on 19th June 1215, I am selecting a series of manifestos and texts written over the centuries that build upon the Magna Carta’s legacy in their own period of history. Each month, from January to June 2015,  I will juxtapose two or more texts in a book made with and shared on bookleteer (and distributed as physical copies to subscribers of the Periodical) as a way of reflecting that, across the generations, the quest continues apace for a fair and just society in which the rights and responsibilities of individuals are respected and upheld without prejudice. By re-presenting these ideas in a series of books I hope others can also draw inspiration from them and help frame the questions and challenges that face both the UK and other countries in the time ahead of us.

    I’m particularly keen to shine a light on ideas and writings from periods such as the mid-17th Century that have inspired me in developing my own sense of what a just and fair society might be like and how it could function. There is much we can learn today from those called Levellers and Diggers – what they sought then has resonated across the centuries and still seems so relevant in our own time. Perhaps we are seeing history repeat itself : then, a chance was missed during the Interregnum (or Commonwealth) for a new kind of society to emerge that could have swept away inherited privilege and arbitrary exploitation of the poor and landless. Instead, the power of the City, landowners and merchants usurped the dominance of king and nobility. Now, over three hundred years later we are seeing the Welfare State – a kind of postwar commonwealth – being dismantled by a similar nexus of wealth and privilege. This process goes hand in hand with the rapacious exploitation of the natural world, subtly reinforced even among environmentalists by the placing of money values on natural ‘resources’ as an argument for their protection from extraction. In this way, every relationship humans have to each other or to the ecologies we live within are divorced from context and connection with the flow of life – anything which could bind us to people and place in ways other than can be defined by money. By elevating money as the paramount value, we are isolating ourselves from each other, from inherent rights and from any sense that we have intrinsic responsibilities and obligations to others and the world we live in.

    I’ve begun the series with a book containing two texts written roughly two hundred years apart, at the apogee of two great moments of change in the UK – the English Civil Wars and the Chartist movement. Both sought radical change to the status quo of how the country was governed, laying crucial foundations for the development of our modern parliamentary democracy and for a just and fair society based on individual rights and responsibilities. That both were rejected by those in power in their own times is a reminder that each generation must continue to strive for its own version of a just and fair society. These texts serve as an inspiration for us now to continue to question and challenge the Powers That Be – to reject their surveillance state, their dismantling of the Welfare State, their greedy pilfering of the commonwealth for their own private gain. And to remind ourselves that, across the centuries, others have stood firm against tyranny whatever form it takes.

    If you’d like to receive the physical versions of the books, please subscribe to the Periodical here. And there’s now a special limited edition (40 sets only) bound together with a red satin ribbon, buy your’s here.
    You can, of course, also read each book for free, either online in their book reader versions or if you download, print out and make up the handmade versions – just visit bookleteer and browse the collection.

  • Embodying Data Workshop

    Last week I was in Edinburgh to run my co-discovery Embodying Data Workshop with 24 of Chris Speed‘s Design Informatics Masters students at the Art College. The workshop was devised a few months ago as part of my Creativeworks residency at Birkbeck College to introduce computer scientists to the possibilities of approaching the problem of data analysis and computation differently by manifesting data in tangible ways. Thus we may bring more of our human senses to bear on meaning making than merely relying, almost exclusively, on vision and hearing as with standard data visualisation techniques.

    It is a hands-on workshop using paper-prototyping methods to explore manifesting data as physical objects – why would we do this? what sort of objects? how could it benefit data analysis and computation methods? – and is an opportunity to speculate on how we might discover new ways to generate insights into complex data sets to discern previously undetected patterns and make meaning.

    The workshop starts off by engaging the participants in identifying 11 major human senses (touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing, temperature, balance, pain, time, proprioception and interception) and discussing other sensory factors. Then we begin to map how many senses we actually use in everyday activities and tasks. In this way it becomes apparent how reliant we are on multiples senses to interpret our experiences of the world around us. How much then are we missing in trying to analyse data using just our visual and occasionally auditory senses? What patterns might also exist that we are simply not able to perceive because the senses that would detect them are not being activated? The last part of this exercise asks the participants to think about data sources and types, such as different kinds of sensors or data feeds/streams as well as the kinds of data coming through – energy use, health, environmental, sales, traffic, communications etc. We then follow on by mapping how we might interrogate such data using additional senses to sight and sound. What benefits might we get from having new ways to explore big and complex data sets? What could happen when we take digital data out of the machine and into the physical world?

    IMG_2891 IMG_2892 IMG_2893 IMG_2894

    IMG_2902 IMG_2903 IMG_2904 IMG_2905

    This exercise is followed by a short presentation on Proboscis’ Lifestreams project: how and why we developed the life charms from biosensor data and what implications we believe it has for creating new insights into health and fitness data for wellbeing. Lifestreams provides both an actual context and talking point to discuss the difference that embodying data in the physical world – making it tangible to the senses – could have.

    The second workshop exercise involves each participant using a blank StoryCube to imagine a data object of their own. I encourage them to use the 6 sides of the cube to indicate data types or streams that they might be using in their existing work or projects which could be used to generate a hypothetical data object. Then, placing their cube on a worksheet, the participants are prompted to consider how their data objects would connect with different human senses; how the objects might interact or connect with each other; whether they are personal or shared objects; what kind of conditions might people encounter them in. Participants are encouraged to consider what implications may arise from all these too.

    IMG_2895 IMG_2896 IMG_2897 IMG_2898 IMG_2899 IMG_2901

    Finally we discuss the ideas that have emerged from the exercise and, more generally, the potential for new insights into complex datasets to emerge from creating the possibility for senses other than sight and hearing to be involved in analysis. The point of the co-discovery workshop is to allow participants to come to their own understanding of the potential and what might be possible, not to be didactic. It aims to plant a seed of curiosity by exploring the gaps and absences in our toolkits for creating new kinds of knowledge, hopefully to inspire entirely new ways of expressing data in physical or environmental forms such that we can move beyond the ghetto of the primacy of the screen.

    Further Iterations
    I am available to deliver the workshop to other groups (academic, cultural or corporate). Please contact me for prices and bookings. The workshop lasts about 3 hours, is suitable for a range of abilities and works best with groups of 10 and more. It has been designed to engage scientists at both postgraduate student (Masters/PhD) and professional staff level (lecturer/researcher). It works equally well with designers, artists and others who are also exploring the use of data as a creative material/medium.