Academic literature on the topic 'Citizen passive feedback'

Educators invest serious effort in bringing their students to adopt the notions of the 'good citizen'. Based on the growing impact of informal learning through social media, especially when asking for online help in civic education assignments, previous studies called for investigating the role of online platforms as arenas of informal civic education. This paper takes up this gauntlet, analyzing inputs of American members of the Yahoo! Answers online community in response to students' queries concerning the definition of the 'good citizen'. The results show a passive and conformist concept of the 'good citizen' that corresponds with previous studies' findings about this image in educational programs and among pre-service teachers, contrary to formal statements regarding the goal of civic education. The paper suggests that there is a feedback loop between offline and online platforms concerning the 'good citizen', which calls for the attention of educators and researches.

Speeding is a leading factor that contributes to approximately one-third of all fatal collisions. Over the past decades, various passive/active countermeasures have been adopted to improve drivers’ compliance to posted speed limits to improve traffic safety. The driver feedback sign (DFS) is considered a low-cost innovative intervention that is being widely used, in growing numbers, in urban cities to provide positive guidance for motorists. Despite their documented effectiveness in reducing speeds, limited literature exists on their impact on reducing collisions. This study addresses this gap by designing a before-and-after study using the empirical Bayes method for a large sample of urban road segments. Safety performance functions and yearly calibration factors are developed to quantify the sole effectiveness of DFS using large-scale spatial data and a set of reference road segments within the city of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Likewise, the study followed a detailed economic analysis based on three collision-costing criteria to investigate if DFS was indeed a cost-effective intervention. The results showed significant collision reductions that ranged from 32.5% to 44.9%, with the highest reductions observed for severe speed-related collisions. The results further attested that the benefit–cost ratios, combining severe and property-damage-only collisions, ranged from 8.2 to 20.2 indicating that DFS can be an extremely economical countermeasure. The findings from this study can provide transportation agencies in need of implementing cost-efficient countermeasures with a tool they need to design a long-term strategic deployment plan to ensure the safety of traveling public.

Public support has long been thought crucial for the vitality and survival of democracy. Existing research has argued that democracy also creates its own demand: through early-years socialization and later-life learning, the presence of a democratic system coupled with the passage of time produces widespread public support for democracy. Using new panel measures of democratic mood varying over 135 countries and up to 30 years, this article finds little evidence for such a positive feedback effect of democracy on support. Instead, it demonstrates a negative thermostatic effect: increases in democracy depress democratic mood, while decreases cheer it. Moreover, it is increases in the liberal, counter-majoritarian aspects of democracy, not the majoritarian, electoral aspects that provoke this backlash from citizens. These novel results challenge existing research on support for democracy, but also reconcile this research with the literature on macro-opinion.

Homo irretitus, globalinės informacijos visuomenės senbuvis, tampa labiausiai paplitusia ir vis svaresne nūdienio bendrabūvio lytimi. Kontrafaktinės informacijos visuomenės sampratos požiūriu telematinės interakcijos įpavidalina šiadienos pasaulį konstitutyviai – per kelis dešimtmečius jos pavirto būtinąja jo pamatinių pavidalų steigties ir buvimo sąlyga. Tokią permainą inter alia lydi nusistovėjusių žinojimo praktikų redukcija į lengvai pasiekiamą ir pavaldomą informacijos masyvų prieigą bei panaudą. Pasyviųjų ir aktyviųjų telematinės interakcijos formų skirtis nyksta – ją keičia skaitmeninis išviršinę prasmę generuojantis perpetuum mobile: lakoniškai reaktyvi iš anksto pateiktos informacijos recepcija bei sintetiniai skaitmeninių kasdienybės interakcijų pavidalai, paklūstantys masinės daugiaveikos ir joje kanalizuojamo turinio paprastinimo imperatyvui. Tačiau vargu ar ši inovacija žada mūsų civilizacinio buvimo pagrindų griūtį ar jų pamatinę perlaužą.Pagrindiniai žodžiai: kontrafaktinė informacijos visuomenės samprata, skaitmeniniai aborigenai, įskaitmenintas žinojimas ir prasmė, homo irretitus.After the two decades of homo irretitus: dispair and dreamsMarius Povilas Šaulauskas SummaryHomo irretitus, the endogenous citizen of global information society, emerges as the most widespread and important figure of the contemporary habitus. In compliance with the counterfactual concept of information society, telematic interactions already serve as a constitutive framework of the modern lifeworld, providing the crucial basis of its enactment and continuous maintenance. The technologically entrenched transformation is inter alia accompanied by the overarching reduction of the received sociocultural practices of knowledge into the easy access to and management of the measureless volumes of information flows and feedbacks. The distinction between active and passive forms of telematic interaction fades away: the newfangled global digital perpetuum mobile, generating superficial structures of meaning, relies on predominantly reactive, multitasking and thereby systematically simplifying appropriation of the communicated content. Nevertheless, it is at least doubtful that this innovative change actually implies a fundamental shift in our civilization.Keywords: couterfactual concept of information society, digital aborigines, digitalized knowledge and meaning, homo irretitus.

Amount raised: In last decade INR 169,708,369 mobilized through sponsored cancer awareness programs. Background and context: With an eagle's eye our vision of eighties resulted in the incorporation of Cancer Aid Society on 8th of December 1987 at Lucknow. Founders of the Cancer Aid Society perceived the threats early and initiated the fight against cancer by developing a self-sustainable model without external financial assistance unfurling series of events internationally. As of now ours is a holistic model on cancer prevention integrated with NCDs, tobacco and palliative care demonstrating replicability within different communities and scalability across the worlds largest democracy having its own network of branches. Aim: Self-sustainable model prevention and control of tobacco, cancer integrated with other NCDs, palliative care and advocacy. Strategy/Tactics: Sponsored cancer awareness programs are organized free of cost in schools and colleges however we accept voluntary donations from the community if any. As schools have contact with the child and their family from kindergarten to senior secondary, they inculcate the spirit of humanitarianism and work for social amelioration improving the overall health of the citizens strengthening the fight against cancer. It covers the need of the current and future generations on cancer control. Program process: Keeping with the ages old adage “Prevention Is Better Than Cure” thousands of community awareness campaigns are organized in educational Institutions every year by mobilizing a million volunteers who generate awareness among twenty million people all over India on health, hygiene, tobacco abuse including passive smoking, carcinogens, balanced diet, regular exercise, obesity, clean drinking water, pollution of air, water and land etc. This plays an integral part in inculcating healthy lifestyle and keeping children away from tobacco at an age when they are vulnerable and tempted the most further grooming our future generation when they are most receptive and in the process of developing habits. They multiply awareness manifold improving the overall health of the community. Costs and returns: As the program follows an integrated and holistic approach on prevention and control of cancer and other NCDs virtually it lacks any administrative costs and offers 100% returns on investments. In last decade INR 144,968,969 spent in sponsored cancer awareness programs. What was learned: With our 30 years of experience of working at grass root community level all across India in spite of regional complexities in terms of multiple languages, cultures, castes, religions etc. ISO 9001 NGO accreditation has given us teeth since 2004 streamlining our functioning through documentation and continuous improvement program through reporting monitoring and feedback. As of now we are ready to share our experiences at international level.

Abstract The early detection of plant pests and diseases is vital to the success of any eradication or control programme, but the resources for surveillance are often limited. Plant health authorities can however make use of observations from individuals and stakeholder groups who are monitoring for signs of ill health. Volunteered data is most often discussed in relation to citizen science groups, however these groups are only part of a wider network of professional agents, land-users and owners who can all contribute to significantly increase surveillance efforts through “passive surveillance”. These ad-hoc reports represent chance observations by individuals who may not necessarily be looking for signs of pests and diseases when they are discovered. Passive surveillance contributes vital observations in support of national and international surveillance programs, detecting potentially unknown issues in the wider landscape, beyond points of entry and the plant trade. This review sets out to describe various forms of passive surveillance, identify analytical methods that can be applied to these “messy” unstructured data, and indicate how new programs can be established and maintained. Case studies discuss two tree health projects from Great Britain (TreeAlert and Observatree) to illustrate the challenges and successes of existing passive surveillance programmes. When analysing passive surveillance reports it is important to understand the observers’ probability to detect and report each plant health issue, which will vary depending on how distinctive the symptoms are and the experience of the observer. It is also vital to assess how representative the reports are and whether they occur more frequently in certain locations. Methods are increasingly available to predict species distributions from large datasets, but more work is needed to understand how these apply to rare events such as new introductions. One solution for general surveillance is to develop and maintain a network of tree health volunteers, but this requires a large investment in training, feedback and engagement to maintain motivation. There are already many working examples of passive surveillance programmes and the suite of options to interpret the resulting datasets is growing rapidly.

AbstractWith an increasingly urban population, cities have an important role to play in global environmental sustainability. Cities engaged in pioneering and ongoing sustainability experimentation—the frontrunners—can lead the way towards sustainability transition, and often become the beacon for others to follow. However, the nature and the internal dynamics that make a city a frontrunner, or the role of frontrunner cities in sustainability transition beyond their boundary, remain unclear. In addition, most studies on the influence of these frontrunners are limited to passive influencing, i.e. how the practice has been duplicated by others, or how the practice is adopted and mainstreamed into system level. Based on in-depth case studies on a frontrunner city and two other cities influenced by it, this paper examines how momentum for positive changes has been initiated, built, and sustained towards changing the status quo of practice through a succession of actors and a series of reinforcing feedback loops. We argue that creating a positive inertia through sustained momentum and embedding the frontrunner identity in a city is essential for it to continue the process of sustainability transition. Frontrunners can create flow-on benefits for other cities through a proactive influencing. Supported by multiple two-way benefits, such proactive influencing is a new mechanism of mainstreaming and up-scaling urban sustainability experiments in system innovation and transition.

On 29 September 1999, Senator Jocelyn Newman, the Australian Government's Minister for Family and Community Services, delivered a controversial address to the National Press Club in Canberra. The delivery had been delayed a week and it was widely rumoured that the Minister had been forced to remove some of the more controversial proposals (see Senate Question Time on 29 September, for instance). The speech, entitled "The Future of Welfare in the 21st Century", announced plans to tackle a supposed trend towards welfare dependency by creating an "active" rather than a "passive" welfare system set within the Government's policy of "Mutual Obligation": a system that focusses on "capacity and ability" (Newman para. 42) and "what people can do" rather than what they can't do (para. 44). This article, however, questions whether the welfare system projected for the future will be enabling for those who use it, or whether income-based social divisions will become further entrenched. Since taking government in 1996, the Coalition's policies have included privatisation of previously government-run utilities and services and restructuring of the economy and industrial relations to assure Australia's place in 'globalisation'. Restructuring the welfare system is but the next step. Speeches such as this one are typically part of the process by which governments expound their 'vision' for the future, announce policy directions and generate public feedback and, had the speech not been delayed a week, it would normally have attracted considerably less attention. However, with the approaching 'end of the millennium' and increasing evidence that economic restructuring and globalisation are not benefiting everyone, debates about the integration of social and economic policies have been a concern for politicians, press and policy-makers for some time (see for instance reporting of the "Australia Unlimited" Conference). While party polling may indicate support for reform (McGregor 28) there is also a perception that society is becoming a "meaner" place (Dickens 22-3). My method derives from the work of Teun A. van Dijk on ideological analysis. He maintains that ideologies function to co-ordinate the activities and thinking of group members so that the group's interests are protected and their goals realised (24). Our social identity is formed in part by our membership of particular groups. In talk and writing we promote the interests of our group by highlighting the positive things our group (the ingroup) has done and minimising or mitigating the negative things. Conversely, we highlight the negative aspects of those not in our group (the outgroup) and minimise their positive aspects (van Dijk 33). This type of analysis is designed to uncover group ideologies (26), not personal positions, and so when I attribute something to "the Minister" it is in her position as member of a group with social and political power whose interests are served by particular social and economic policies. I do not attribute it to Jocelyn Newman personally. At the most obvious level, the Minister constructs the Government as ingroup and the Opposition as outgroup. She does this by highlighting the achievements of her government while highlighting the failures of the Opposition. For instance, paragraph six says: ... the Howard Government has embarked upon a range of challenging and difficult policy agenda. We have reformed the tax system, so that it supports our new economic and social structures -- not those of the 1930s. We have reformed workplace relations in this country so that it supports the flexible and productive workplaces needed to provide jobs. As a result of our sound economic management, we have enjoyed strong, non-inflationary economic growth with low interest rates, and high employment growth. This is all the more remarkable when considered in the context of the Asian economic crisis. By contrast, she says: "the Opposition has failed to support responsible economic policy" and implies that their policies amount to "empty promises" which would be damaging if carried through (para. 11). There is ingroup/outgroup definition at a more subtle level also. The Minister uses "we" in paragraphs three to five to refer to a broad coalition of Government and community and presents the Government's own interests as being the interests of the broader group, thereby implying that they are really only one interest group when it comes to social and economic policy. Paragraph six reinforces this by showing that "we" (the community) have benefitted from the reforms that "we" (the Government) have embarked upon. This blurring of group boundaries between Government and community is also a way of shifting responsibility as I shall show shortly below. Before that, it is informative to look at the way welfare recipients are classified. They are not described as doing anything positive. The exception is "older women who have spent their lives caring for others" (para. 35), but who are then characterised as "uncertain" and "discouraged" (para. 35). Caring for others (generally undervalued in our individualistic society) is to be seen as a limited-time option only, with work being the ultimate goal (para. 48-53). Passivity and dependency are both devalued in our society -- praise is generally reserved for people who are active while "economic security and independence" (para. 9) are assumed to be everyone's goals. In the speech, however, people receiving welfare payments are defined in terms of: the welfare they receive (e.g. 53, 46, 39, 29, etc); their lack of income (e.g. 46, 15, etc.); their lack of paid work (e.g. 24, 25, 26,31, 33, 35, etc.); their age (e.g. 19, 23, 29, 35, 36, etc.); their family responsibilities (e.g. 24, 25, 26, 27, 35, etc); or their disabilities (e.g. 38, 39, 40, etc.). Even the words used are passive rather than active: "people on passive welfare assistance" rather than an active verb like "claiming" or even "receiving". Again, "no adult in paid work" (para. 24), "out of paid work" (para. 25), and "worklessness" (para. 26) are all attributes implying passivity. If she had used instead the expression 'non-working' it would at least imply the possibility of working, which is active. The term dependency commonly has associations with childhood and addiction which partly carry over to the term "welfare dependency" used by the Minister to describe the state of those receiving income support. These people may still be part of the community (para. 31), but they are contrasted with the community proper: the taxpayers (para. 19) and "hard working men and women of this country" who underwrite them (para. 32). The new welfare system places people receiving income support under obligation. They are expected to "help themselves" (para. 12, 13, 20), contribute to the economy and society (para. 12, 13), and "use every opportunity to become self-supporting" (para. 19). It becomes clear that the obligation on these people is to do whatever they can to get themselves into sufficient paid work so that they no longer need income support. The specified social contribution is minimal (para. 18, 48, 47, 37, 50). The duty of the responsible citizen is primarily economic -- to get a self-supporting job (para. 29-30). As we have seen, then, the ingroup consists of the Government and those members of the community who have benefited from the Government's economic reforms. The outgroup consists of those people who, due to low wages or unemployment, are dependent on income support -- i.e. those who have not benefitted from the Government's economic reforms. I now want to return to the matter of responsibility and the blurred boundaries between Government and community referred to above. The policies, reforms and initiatives are credited to the government (para. 15, 16, and 19 for example), but the responsibilities lie with "the community" and "the individual" (para. 17). "The community" is not a clearly defined entity, yet the Minister says that it "must and should provide income support" for those who cannot get a job despite their best efforts in the case of a genuine failure of the labour market (para. 31) -- a situation she has already claimed does not exist (para. 6). Throughout the sections on "People with disabilities" and "Parenting Payment", the Minister uses "we" inclusively (Government and community) when talking about what should be done for 'them' and non-inclusively (Government only) when talking about specific programs (50). The effect, as mentioned above, is to assert that the interests of one are the interests of both, but also to transfer the responsibility for doing something for 'them' to the broader community group. Together with the statement that "the community needs to think carefully and thoroughly" about "our" approach to income support and assistance (38), this blurring of boundaries prepares for the announcement of a Reference Group to "guide the development of a comprehensive Green Paper on welfare reform" (54). This "high-level" group will be "seeking submissions from interest groups and the broader community" (56), but the terms of reference and ultimate policies will be set by the government. I would suggest that "we" is used strategically in this speech to create in ordinary community members a sense of inclusion, ownership and responsibility for policies in which they ultimately will have little say. But by transferring the sense of responsibility in this way, the government removes from itself total responsibility when those policies fail. Will welfare in the coming years really be about enabling people to develop their capacities? I would suggest this is not possible while the people concerned are still conceptualised in terms of passivity and deficiency, and are regarded as not being part of 'our' group, not sharing 'our' interests. Rather, this speech projects a future where those who are self-supporting are encouraged to assume a position of superiority to those who are not, while their own interests are subsumed in the economic and social agendas of the Government. This speech also suggests a society where the only capacity that counts is the capacity to earn an income and people's responsibility to one another is limited to these terms. It seems clear that while the Government will continue to set the rules, it will continue to shirk provision of services, instead handing that responsibility to an ill-defined "community" and increasing the community's sense that those who receive welfare are somehow responsible for their own situation because they have not accepted their "responsibility" and "obligation" to help themselves. Is an economically driven, socially divided society what we want to create as we enter a new century? References "Australia Unlimited." Special Liftout. Weekend Australian 8-9 May 1999. Department of Family and Community Services. "Reference Group on Welfare Reform: Request for Public Submissions." Weekend Australian 23-4 Oct. 1999: 19. Dickens, Barry. "The Price of Kindness on Mean Streets." Weekend Australian 1-2 Jan. 2000: Review 22-23. McGregor, Richard. "Operation Dole Bludger." Weekend Australian 28-9 Aug. 1999: Focus 28. Newman, Jocelyn. "The Future of Welfare in the 21st Century." National Press Club, Canberra. 29 Sep. 1999. 10 Jan. 2000 <http://www.facs.gov.au/internet/newman.nsf/v1/sdiscusswelfare.htm>. Shanahan, Dennis. "Jobless Put Straight to Work." Australian 17 Dec. 1999: 1. Van Dijk, Teun A. "Opinions and Ideologies in the Press." Approaches to Media Discourse. Ed. Allan Bell and Peter Garrett. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 21-63. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Lisa Gunders. "Welfare in the Future -- What Kind of Society?." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.9 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/welfare.php>. Chicago style: Lisa Gunders, "Welfare in the Future -- What Kind of Society?," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 9 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/welfare.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Lisa Gunders. (2000) Welfare in the future -- what kind of society?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(9). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/welfare.php> ([your date of access]).

IntroductionThis article addresses the experience of designing and conducting life-writing workshops for a group of clients with severe mental illness; the aim of this pilot study was to begin to determine whether such writing about the self can aid in individual ‘recovery’, as that term is understood by contemporary health professionals. A considerable amount has been written about the potential of creative writing in mental health therapy; the authors of this article provide a brief summary of that literature, then of the concept of ‘recovery’ in a psychology and arts therapy context. There follows a first-hand account by one of the authors of being an arts therapy workshop facilitator in the role of a creative practitioner. This occurred in consultation with, and monitored by, experienced mental health professionals. Life-Writing as ‘Therapeutic’ Life-story or life-writing can be understood in this context as involving more than disclosure or oral expression of a subject’s ‘story’ as in psycho-therapy – life-story is understood as a written, structured narrative. In 2001, Wright and Chung published a review of the literature in which they claimed that writing therapy had been “restimulated by the development of narrative approaches” (278). Pennebaker argues that “catharsis or the venting of emotions” without “cognitive processing” has little therapeutic value and people need to “build a coherent narrative that explains some past experience” in order to benefit from writing” (Pennebaker, Telling Stories 10–11). It is claimed in the Clinical Psychology Review that life-writing has the therapeutic benefits of, for example, “striking physical health and behaviour change” (Esterling et al. 84). The reasons are still unclear, but it is possible that the cognitive and linguistic processing of problematic life-events through narrative writing may help the subject assimilate such problems (Alschuler 113–17). As Pennebaker and Seagal argue in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, the life-writing processallows one to organise and remember events in a coherent fashion while integrating thoughts and feelings ... This gives individuals a sense of predictability and control over their lives. Once an experience has structure and meaning, it would follow that the emotional effects of that experience are more manageable. (1243)It would seem reasonable to suggest that life-writing which constructs a positive recovery narrative can have a positive therapeutic effect, providing a sense of agency, connectedness and creativity, in a similar, integrating manner. Humans typically see their lives as stories. Paul Eakin stresses the link between narrative and identity in both this internal life-story and in outwardly constructed autobiography:narrative is not merely a literary form but a mode of phenomenological and cognitive self-experience, while self – the self of autobiographical discourse - does not necessarily precede its constitution in narrative. (Making Selves 100)So both a self-in-time and a socially viable identity may depend on such narrative. The term ‘dysnarrativia’ has been coined to describe the documented inability to construct self-narrative by those suffering amnesia, autism, severe child abuse or brain damage. The lack of ability to achieve narrative construction seems to be correlated with identity disorders (Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography 124). (For an overview of the current literature on creative and life-writing as therapy see Murphy & Neilsen). What is of particular relevance to university creative writing practitioners/teachers is that there is evidence, for example from Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman and creative writing academic Vicki Linder, that life-narratives are more therapeutically effective if guided to be written according to fundamental ‘effective writing’ aesthetic conventions – such as having a regard to coherent structure in the narrative, the avoidance of cliché, practising the ‘demonstrate don’t state’ dictum, and writing in one’s own voice, for example. Defining ‘Recovery’There remains debate as to the meaning of recovery in the context of mental health service delivery, but there is agreement that recovery entails significantly more than symptom remission or functional improvement (Liberman & Kopelowicz). In a National Consensus Statement, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) unit of the US Department of Health and Human Services in 2005 described recovery (in general terms) as being achieved by the enabling of a person with a mental illness to live meaningfully in a chosen community, while also attempting to realize individual potential. ‘Recovery’ as a central concept behind rehabilitation can be understood both as objective recovery – that is, in terms of noting a reduction in objective indicators of illness and disability (such as rates of hospital usage or unemployment) and a greater degree of social functioning – and also as subjective recovery. Subjective recovery can be ascertained by listening closely to what clients themselves have said about their own experiences. It has been pointed out (King, Lloyd & Meehan 2) that there is not always a correspondence between objective indicators of recovery and the subjective, lived experience of recovery. The experience of mental illness is not just one of symptoms and disability but equally importantly one of major challenge to sense of self. Equally, recovery from mental illness is experienced not just in terms of symptoms and disability but also as a recovery of sense of self … Recovery of sense of self and recovery with respect to symptoms and disability may not correspond. (King, Lloyd & Meehan; see also Davidson & Strauss)Symptoms of disability can persist, but a person can have a much stronger sense of self or empowerment – that is still recovery. Illness dislocates the sense of self as part of a community and of a self with skills and abilities. Restoring this sense of empowerment is an aim of arts therapy. To put it another way, recovery is a complex process by which a client with a mental illness develops a sense of identity and agency as a citizen, as distinct from identification with illness and disability and passivity as a ‘patient’. The creative arts have gone well beyond being seen as a diversion for the mentally ill. In a comprehensive UK study of creative arts projects for clients with mental illness, Helen Spandler et al. discovered strong evidence that participation in creative activity promoted a sense of purpose and meaning, and assisted in “rediscovering or rebuilding an identity within and beyond that of someone with mental health difficulties” (795). Recovery is aided by people being motivated to achieve self-confidence through mastery and competence; by learning and achieving goals. Clearly this is where arts therapy could be expected or hoped to be effective. The aim of the pilot study was not to measure ‘creativity’, but whether involvement in what is commonly understood as a creative process (life-writing) can have flow-on benefits in terms of the illness of the workshop participant. The psychologists involved, though more familiar with visual arts therapy (reasonably well-established in Australia – in 2006, the ANZAT began publishing the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art Therapy), thought creative writing could also be valuable. Preparation for and Delivery of the Workshops I was acutely aware that I had no formal training in delivering a program to clients with mental health illness. I was counselled during several meetings with experienced psychologists and a social worker that the participants in the three workshops over two weeks would largely be people who had degrees of difficulty in living independently, and could well have perceptual problems, could misjudge signals from outside and inside the group, and be on medication that could affect their degree of engagement. Some clients could have impaired concentration and cognition, and a deficit in volition. Participants needed to be free to leave and rejoin the workshops during the afternoon sessions. Attendance might well fall as the workshops progressed. Full ethical clearance was attained though the University of Queensland medical faculty (after detailed description of the content and conduct of the proposed workshops) and consent forms prepared for participants. My original workshop ‘kit’ to be distributed to participants underwent some significant changes as I was counselled and prepared for the workshops. The major adjustment to my usual choice of material and approach was made in view of the advice that recounting traumatic events can have a negative effect on some patients – at least in the short term. For the sake of both the individuals and the group as a whole this was to be avoided. I changed my initial emphasis on encouraging participants to recount their traumatic experiences in a cathartic way (as suggested by the narrative psychology literature), to encouraging them to recount positive narratives from their lives – narratives of ‘recovery’ – as I explain in more detail below. I was also counselled that clients with mental health problems might dwell on retelling their story – their case history – rather than reflecting upon it or using their creative and imaginative ability to shape a life-story that was not a catalogue of their medical history. Some participants did demonstrate a desire to retell their medical history or narrative – including a recurring theme of the difficulty in gaining continuity with one trusted medical professional. I gently guided these participants back to fashioning a different and more creative narrative, with elements of scene creation, description and so on, by my first listening intently to and acknowledging their medical narrative for a few minutes and then suggesting we try to move beyond that. This simple strategy was largely successful; several participants commented explicitly that they were tired of having to retell their medical history to each new health professional they encountered in the hospital system, for example. My principal uncertainty was whether I should conduct the workshops at the same level of complexity that I had in the past with groups of university students or community groups. While in both of those cohorts there will often be some participants with mental health issues, for the most part this possibility does not affect the level or kind of content of material discussed in workshops. However, within this pilot group all had been diagnosed with moderate to severe mental illness, mostly schizophrenia, but also bipolar disorder and acute depression and anxiety disorders. The fact that my credentials were only as a published writer and teacher of creative writing, not as a health professional, was also a strong concern to me. But the clients readily accepted me as someone who knew the difficulty of writing well and getting published. I stressed to them that my primary aim was to teach effective creative writing as an end in itself. That it might be beneficial in health terms was secondary. It was a health professional who introduced me and briefly outlined the research aims of the workshop – including some attempt to measure qualitatively any possible benefits. It was my impression that the participants did not have a diminished sense of my usefulness because I was not a health professional. Their focus was on having the opportunity to practice creative writing and/or participate in a creative group activity. As mentioned above, I had prepared a workshop ‘kit’ for the participants of 15 pages. It contained the usual guidelines for effective writing – extracts from professional writers’ published work (including an extract from my own published work – a matter of equity, since they were allowing me to read their work), and a number of writing exercises (using description, concrete and abstract words, narrative point of view, writing in scenes, show don’t tell). The kit contained extracts from memoirs by Hugh Lunn and Bill Bryson, as well as a descriptive passage from Charles Dickens. An extract from Inga Clendinnen’s 2006 account in Agamemnon’s Kiss: selected essays of her positive interaction with fellow cancer patients (a narrative with the underlying theme of recovery) was also valuable for the participants. I stressed to the group that this material was very similar to that used with beginning writers among university students. I described the importance of life-writing as follows: Life-writing is simply telling a story from your life and perhaps musing or commenting on it at the same time. When you write a short account of something chosen from your life, you are making a pattern, using your memory, using your powers of description – you are being creative. You are being a story-teller. And story-telling is one very important thing that makes us humans different from all other animals – and it is a way in which we find a lot of meaning in our lives.My central advice in the kit was: “Just try to be as honest as you can – and to remember as well as you can … being honest and direct is both the best and the easiest way to write memoir”. The only major difference between my approach with these clients and that with a university class was in the selection of possible topics offered. In keeping with the advice of the psychologists who were experts in the theory of ‘recovery’, the topics were predominantly positive, though one or two topics gave the opportunity to recount and/or explore a negative experience if the participant wanted to do so: A time when I was able to help another personA time when I realised what really mattered in lifeA time when I overcame a major difficultyA time when I felt part of a group or teamA time when I knew what I wanted to do with my lifeA time when someone recognised a talent or quality of mineA time I did something that I was proud of A time when I learned something important to meA memorable time when I lived in a certain house or suburbA story that begins: “Looking back, I now understand that …”The group expressed satisfaction with these topics, though they had the usual writing students’ difficulty in choosing the one that best suited them. In the first two workshops we worked our way through the kit; in the third workshop, two weeks later, each participant read their own work to the group and received feedback from their peers and me. The feedback was encouraged to be positive and constructive, and the group spontaneously adopted a positive reinforcement approach, applauding each piece of writing. Workshop DynamicsThe venue for the workshops was a suburban house in the Logan area of Brisbane used as a drop-in centre for those with mental illness, and the majority of the participants would be familiar with it. It had a large, breezy deck on which a round-table configuration of seating was arranged. This veranda-type setting was sheltered enough to enable all to be heard easily and formal enough to emphasise a learning event was taking place; but it was also open enough to encourage a relaxed atmosphere. The week before the first workshop I visited the house to have lunch with a number of the participants. This gave me a sense of some of the participants’ personalities and degree of engagement, the way they related to each other, and in turn enabled them to begin to have some familiarity with me and ask questions. As a novice at working with this kind of client, I found this experience extremely valuable, especially as it suggested that a relatively high degree of communication and cognition would be possible, and it reduced the anxiety I had about pitching the workshops at an appropriate level. In the course of the first workshop, the most initially sceptical workshop participant ended up being the most engaged contributor. A highly intelligent woman, she felt it would be too upsetting to write about negative events, but ultimately wrote a very effective piece about the empowerment she gained from caring for a stray cat and locating the owner. Her narrative also expressed her realisation that the pet was partly a replacement for spending time with her son, who lived interstate. Another strong participant previously had written a book-length narrative of her years of misdiagnoses and trauma in the hospital system before coming under the care of her present health professionals. The participant who had the least literacy skills was accepted by the group as an equal and after a while contributed enthusiastically. Though he refused to sign the consent form at the outset, he asked to do so at the close of the first afternoon. The workshop was comprised of clients from two health provider organisations; at first the two groups tended to speak with those they already knew (as in any such situation in the broader community), but by the third workshop a sense of larger group identity was being manifested in their comments, as they spoke of what ‘the group’ would like in the future – such as their work being published in some form. It was clear that, as in a university setting, part of the beneficial effect of the workshops came from group and face to face interaction. It would be more difficult to have this dimension of benefit achieved via a web-based version of the workshops, though a chat room scenario would presumably go some way towards establishing a group feeling. Web-based delivery would certainly suit participants who lacked mobility or who lived in the regions. Clearly the Internet is a vital social networking tool, and an Internet-based version of the workshops could well be attempted in the future. My own previous experience of community digital storytelling workshops (Neilsen, Digital Storytelling as Life-writing) suggests that a high degree of technical proficiency can not be expected across such a cohort; but with adequate technical support, a program (the usual short, self-written script, recorded voice-over and still images scanned from the participants’ photo albums, etc) could make digital storytelling a further dimension of therapeutic life-writing for clients with mental illness. One of the most useful teaching techniques in a class room setting is the judicious use of humour – to create a sense of sharing a perspective, and simply to make material more entertaining. I tested the waters at the outset by referring to the mental health worker sitting in the background, and declaring (with some comic exaggeration) my concern that if I didn’t run the workshop well he would report adversely on me. There was general laughter and this expression of my vulnerability seemed to defuse anxiety on the part of some participants. As the workshop progressed I found I could use both humorous extracts of life-writing and ad hoc comic comments (never at the expense of a participant) as freely as in a university class. Participants made some droll comments in the overall context of encouraging one another in their contributions, both oral and written. Only one participant exhibited some temporary distress during one of the workshops. I was allowing another participant the freedom to digress from the main topic and the participant beside me displayed agitation and sharply demanded we get back to the point. I apologised and acknowledged I had not stayed as focused as I should and returned to the topic. I suspect I had a fortunate first experience of such arts therapy workshops – and that this was largely due to the voluntary nature of the study and that most of the participants brought a prior positive experience of the workshop scenario, and prior interest in creative writing, to the workshops. Outcomes A significantly positive outcome was that only one of the nine participants missed a session (through ill-health) and none left during workshops. The workshops tended to proceed longer than the three hours allotted on each occasion. Post-workshop interviews were conducted by a psychologist with the participants. Detailed data is not available yet – but there was a clear indication by almost all participants that they felt the workshops were beneficial and that they would like to participate in further workshops. All but one agreed to have their life-writing included in a newsletter produced by one of the sponsors of the workshops. The positive reception of the workshops by the participants has encouraged planning to be undertaken for a wide-ranging longitudinal study by means of a significant number of workshops in both life-writing and visual arts in more than one city, conducted by a team of health professionals and creative practitioners – this time with sophisticated measurement instruments to gauge the effectiveness of art therapy in aiding ‘recovery’. Small as the workshop group was, the pilot study seems to validate previous research in the UK and US as we have summarised above. The indications are that significant elements of recovery (in particular, feelings of enhanced agency and creativity), can be achieved by life-writing workshops that are guided by creative practitioners; and that it is the process of narrative construction within life-writing that engages with or enhances a sense of self and identity. NoteWe are indebted, in making the summary of the concept of ‘recovery’ in health science terms, to work in progress by the following research team: Robert King, Tom O'Brien and Claire Edwards (School of Medicine, University of Queensland), Margot Schofield and Patricia Fenner (School of Public Health, Latrobe University). We are also grateful for the generous assistance of both this group and Seiji Humphries from the Richmond Queensland Fellowship, in providing preparation for the workshops. ReferencesAlschuler, Mari. “Lifestories – Biography and Autobiography as Healing Tools for Adults with Mental Illness.” Journal of Poetry Therapy 11.2 (1997): 113–17.Davidson, Larry and John Strauss. “Sense of Self in Recovery from Severe Mental Illness.” British Journal of Medical Psychology 65 (1992): 31–45.Eakin, Paul. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies of the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.———. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999.Esterling, B.A., L. L’Abate., E.J. Murray, and J.W. Pennebaker. “Empirical Foundations for Writing in Prevention and Psychotherapy: Mental and Physical Health Outcomes.” Clinical Psychology Review 19.1 (1999): 79–96.Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.King, Robert, Chris Lloyd, and Tom Meehan. Handbook of Psychosocial Rehabilitation. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.Liberman, Robert, and Alex Kopelowicz. “Recovery from Schizophrenia: A Criterion-Based Definition.” In Ralph, R., and P. Corrigan (eds). Recovery in Mental Illness: Broadening Our Understanding of Wellness. Washington, DC: APA, 2005.Linder, Vicki. “The Tale of two Bethanies: Trauma in the Creative Writing Classroom.” New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing 1.1 (2004): 6–14Murphy, Ffion, and Philip Neilsen. “Recuperating Writers – and Writing: The Potential of Writing Therapy.” TEXT 12.1 (Apr. 2008). ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/april08/murphy_neilsen.htm›.Neilsen, Philip. “Digital Storytelling as Life-Writing: Self-Construction, Therapeutic Effect, Textual Analysis Leading to an Enabling ‘Aesthetic’ for the Community Voice.” ‹http://www.speculation2005.qut.edu.au/papers/Neilsen.pdf›.Pennebaker, James W., and Janel D. Seagal. “Forming a Story: The Health Benefits of Narrative.” Journal of Clinical Psychology, 55.10 (1999): 1243–54.Pennebaker, James W. “Telling Stories: The Health Benefits of Narrative.” Literature and Medicine 19.1 (2000): 3–18.Spandler, H., J. Secker, L. Kent, S. Hacking, and J. Shenton. “Catching Life: The Contribution of Arts Initiatives to ‘Recovery’ Approaches in Mental Health.” Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing 14.8 (2007): 791–799.Wright, Jeannie, and Man Cheung Chung. “Mastery or Mystery? Therapeutic Writing: A Review of the Literature.” British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 29.3 (2001): 277–91.

Our daily environment is surrounded by a paradoxically silent and invisible flow: the coming and going of data through our network cables, routers and wireless devices. This data is not just 1s and 0s, but bits of the conversations, images, sounds, thoughts and other forms of information that result from our interaction with the world around us. If we can speak of a global ambience, it is certainly derived from this constant flow of data. It is an endless murmur that speaks to our machines and gives us a sense of awareness of a certain form of surrounding that is independent from our actual, physical location. The constant “presence” of data around us is something that we have become largely aware of. Already in 1994, Phil Agre stated in an article in WIRED Magazine: “We're so accustomed to data that hardly anyone questions it” (1). Agre indicated that this data is in fact a representation of the world, the discrete bits of information that form the reality we are immersed in. He also proposed that it should be “brought to life” by exploring its relationships with other data and the world itself. A decade later, these relationships had become the core of the new paradigm of the World Wide Web and our interaction with cyberspace. As Mitchell Whitelaw puts it: “The web is increasingly a set of interfaces to datasets ... . On the contemporary web the data pour has become the rule, rather than the exception. The so-called ‘web 2.0’ paradigm further abstracts web content into feeds, real-time flows of XML data” ("Art against Information"). These feeds and flows have been used by artists and researchers in the creation of different forms of dynamic visualisations, in which data is mapped according to a set of parameters in order to summarise it in a single image or structure. Lev Manovich distinguishes in these visualisations those made by artists, to which he refers as “data art”. Unlike other forms of mapping, according to Manovich data art has a precise goal: “The more interesting and at the end maybe more important challenge is how to represent the personal subjective experience of a person living in a data society” (15). Therefore, data artists extract from the bits of information available in cyberspace a dynamic representation of our contemporary environment, the ambience of our digital culture, our shared, intimate and at the same time anonymous, subjectivity. In this article I intend to present some of the ways in which artists have dealt with the murmur of data creatively, exploring the immense amounts of user generated content in forms that interrogate our relationship with the virtual environment and the global community. I will discuss several artistic projects that have shaped the data flow on the Internet in order to take the user back to a state of contemplation, as a listener, an observer, and finally encountering the virtual in a physical form. Listening The concept of ambience particularly evokes an auditory experience related to a given location: in filmmaking, it refers to the sounds of the surrounding space and is the opposite of silence; as a musical genre, ambient music contributes to create a certain atmosphere. In relation to flows of data, it can be said that the applications that analyze Internet traffic and information are “listening” to it, as if someone stands in a public place, overhearing other people's conversations. The act of listening also implies a reception, not an emission, which is a substantial distinction given the fact that data art projects work with given data instead of generating it. As Mitchell Whitelaw states: “Data here is first of all indexical of reality. Yet it is also found, or to put it another way, given. ... Data's creation — in the sense of making a measurement, framing and abstracting something from the flux of the real — is left out” (3). One of the most interesting artistic projects to initially address this sort of “listening” is Carnivore (2001) by the Radical Software Group. Inspired by DCS1000, an e-mail surveillance software developed by the FBI, Carnivore (which was actually the original name of the FBI's program) listens to Internet traffic and serves this data to interfaces (clients) designed by artists, which interpret the provided information in several ways. The data packets can be transformed into an animated graphic, as in amalgamatmosphere (2001) by Joshua Davis, or drive a fleet of radio controlled cars, as in Police State (2003) by Jonah Brucker-Cohen. Yet most of these clients treat data as a more or less abstract value (expressed in numbers) that serves to trigger the reactions in each client. Carnivore clients provide an initial sense of the concept of ambience as reflected in the data circulating the Internet, yet other projects will address this subject more eloquently. Fig. 1: Ben Rubin, Mark Hansen, Listening Post (2001-03). Multimedia installation. Photo: David Allison.Listening Post (2001-04) by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin is an installation consisting of 231 small electronic screens distributed in a semicircular grid [fig.1: Listening Post]. The screens display texts culled from thousands of Internet chat rooms, which are read by a voice synthesiser and arranged synchronically across the grid. The installation thus becomes a sort of large panel, somewhere between a videowall and an altarpiece, which invites the viewer to engage in a meditative contemplation, seduced by the visual arrangement of the flickering texts scrolling on each screen, appearing and disappearing, whilst sedated by the soft, monotonous voice of the machine and an atmospheric musical soundtrack. The viewer is immersed in a particular ambience generated by the fragmented narratives of the anonymous conversations extracted from the Internet. The setting of the piece, isolated in a dark room, invites contemplation and silence, as the viewer concentrates on seeing and listening. The artists clearly state that their goal in creating this installation was to recreate a sense of ambience that is usually absent in electronic communications: “A participant in a chat room has limited sensory access to the collective 'buzz' of that room or of others nearby – the murmur of human contact that we hear naturally in a park, a plaza or a coffee shop is absent from the online experience. The goal of Listening Post is to collect this buzz and render it at a human scale” (Hansen 114-15). The "buzz", as Hansen and Rubin describe it, is in fact nonexistent in the sense that it does not take place in any physical environment, but is rather the imagined output of the circulation of a myriad blocks of data through the Net. This flow of data is translated into audible and visible signals, thus creating a "murmur" that the viewer can relate to her experience in interacting with other humans. The ambience of a room full of people engaged in conversation is artificially recreated and expanded beyond the boundaries of a real space. By extracting chats from the Internet, the murmur becomes global, reflecting the topics that are being shared by users around the world, in an improvised, ever-changing embodiment of the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the time, or even a certain stream of consciousness on a planetary scale. Fig. 2: Gregory Chatonsky, L'Attente - The Waiting (2007). Net artwork. Photo: Gregory Chatonsky.The idea of contemplation and receptiveness is also present in another artwork that elaborates on the concept of the Zeitgeist. L'Attente [The Waiting] (2007) by Gregory Chatonsky is a net art piece that feeds from the data on the Internet to create an open, never-ending fiction in real time [Fig.2: The Waiting]. In this case, the viewer experiences the artwork on her personal computer, as a sort of film in which words, images and sounds are displayed in a continuous sequence, driven by a slow paced soundtrack that confers a sense of unity to the fragmented nature of the work. The data is extracted in real time from several popular sites (photos from Flickr, posts from Twitter, sound effects from Odeo), the connection between image and text being generated by the network itself: the program extracts text from the posts that users write in Twitter, then selects some words to perform a search on the Flickr database and retrieve photos with matching keywords. The viewer is induced to make sense of this concatenation of visual and audible content and thus creates a story by mentally linking all the elements into what Chatonsky defines as "a fiction without narration" (Chatonsky, Flußgeist). The murmur here becomes a story, but without the guiding voice of a narrator. As with Listening Post, the viewer is placed in the role of a witness or a voyeur, subject to an endless flow of information which is not made of the usual contents distributed by mainstream media, but the personal and intimate statements of her peers, along with the images they have collected and the portraits that identify them in the social networks. In contrast to the overdetermination of History suggested by the term Zeitgeist, Chatonsky proposes a different concept, the spirit of the flow or Flußgeist, which derives not from a single idea expressed by multiple voices but from a "voice" that is generated by listening to all the different voices on the Net (Chatonsky, Zeitgeist). Again, the ambience is conceived as the combination of a myriad of fragments, which requires attentive contemplation. The artist describes this form of interacting with the contents of the piece by making a reference to the character of the angel Damiel in Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin, 1987): “to listen as an angel distant and proximate the inner voice of people, to place the hand on their insensible shoulder, to hold without being able to hold back” (Chatonsky, Flußgeist). The act of listening as described in Wenders's character illustrates several key aspects of the above mentioned artworks: there is, on the one hand, a receptiveness, carried out by the applications that extract data from the Internet, which cannot be “hold back” by the user, unable to control the flow that is evolving in front of her. On the other hand, the information she receives is always fragmentary, made up of disconnected parts which are, in the words of the artist Lisa Jevbratt, “rubbings ... indexical traces of reality” (1). Observing The observation of our environment takes us to consider the concept of landscape. Landscape, in its turn, acquires a double nature when we compare our relationship with the physical environment and the digital realm. In this sense, Mitchell Whitelaw stresses that while data moves at superhuman speed, the real world seems slow and persistent (Landscape). The overlapping of dynamic, fast-paced, virtual information on a physical reality that seems static in comparison is one of the distinctive traits of the following projects, in which the ambience is influenced by realtime data in a visual form that is particularly subtle, or even invisible to the naked eye. Fig. 3: Carlo Zanni, The Fifth Day (2009). Net artwork. Screenshot retrieved on 4/4/2009. Photo: Carlo Zanni. The Fifth Day (2009) by Carlo Zanni is a net art piece in which the artist has created a narration by displaying a sequence of ten pictures showing a taxi ride in the city of Alexandria [Fig.3: The Fifth Day]. Although still, the images are dynamic in the sense that they are transformed according to data retrieved from the Internet describing the political and cultural status of Egypt, along with data extracted from the user's own identity on the Net, such as her IP or city of residence. Every time a user accesses the website where the artwork is hosted, this data is collected and its values are applied to the photos by cloning or modifying particular elements in them. For instance, a photograph of a street will show as many passersby as the proportion of seats held by women in national parliament, while the reflection in the taxi driver's mirror in another photo will be replaced by a picture taken from Al-Jazeera's website. Zanni addresses the viewer's perception of the Middle East by inserting small bits of additional information and also elements from the viewer's location and culture into the images of the Egyptian city. The sequence is rendered as the trailer of a political thriller, enhanced by a dramatic soundtrack and concluded with the artwork's credits. As with the abovementioned projects, the viewer must adopt a passive role, contemplating the images before her and eventually observing the minute modifications inserted by the data retrieved in real time. Yet, in this case, the ambience is not made manifest by a constant buzz to which one must listen, but quite more subtly it is suggested by the fact that not even a still image is always the same. As if observing a landscape, the overall impression is that nothing has changed while there are minor transformations that denote a constant evolution. Zanni has explored this idea in previous works such as eBayLandscape (2004), in which he creates a landscape image by combining data extracted from several websites, or My Temporary Visiting Position from the Sunset Terrace Bar (2007), in which a view of the city of Ahlen (Germany) is combined with a real time webcam image of the sky in Naples (Italy). Although they may seem self-enclosed, these online, data-driven compositions also reflect the global ambience, the Zeitgeist, in different forms. As Carlo Giordano puts it: "Aesthetically, the work aims to a nearly seamless integration of mixed fragments. The contents of these parts, reflecting political and economical issues ... thematize actuality and centrality, amplifying the author's interest in what everybody is talking about, what happens hic et nunc, what is in the fore of the media and social discourse" (16-17). A landscape made of data, such as Zanni's eBayLandscape, is the most eloquent image of how an invisible layer of information is superimposed over our physical environment. Fig. 4: Clara Boj and Diego Díaz, Red Libre, Red Visible (2004-06). Intervention in the urban space. Photo: Lalalab.Artists Clara Boj and Diego Díaz, moreover, have developed a visualisation of the actual flows of data that permeate the spaces we inhabit. In Red Libre, Red Visible [Free Network, Visible Network] (2004-06), Boj and Díaz used Augmented Reality (AR) technology to display the flows of data in a local wireless network by creating AR marker tags that were placed on the street. A Carnivore client developed by the artists enabled anyone with a webcam pointing towards the marker tag and connected to the Wi-Fi network to see in real time the data packets flowing from their computer towards the tag [Fig.4: Red Libre]. The marker tags therefore served both as a tool for the visualisation of network activity as well as a visual sign of the existence of an open network in a particular urban area. Later on, they added the possibility of inserting custom made messages, 3D shapes and images that would appear when a particular AR marker tag was seen through the lens of the webcam. With this project, Boj and Díaz give the user the ability to observe and interact with a layer of her environment that was previously invisible and in some senses, out of reach. The artists developed this idea further in Observatorio [Observatory] (2008), a sightseeing telescope that reveals the existence of Wi-Fi networks in an urban area. In both projects, an important yet unnoticed aspect of our surroundings is brought into focus. As with Carlo Zanni's projects, we are invited to observe what usually escapes our perception. The ambience in our urban environment has also been explored by Julian Oliver, Clara Boj, Diego Díaz and Damian Stewart in The Artvertiser (2009-10), a hand-held augmented reality (AR) device that allows to substitute advertising billboards with custom made images. As Naomi Klein states in her book No Logo, the public spaces in most cities have been dominated by corporate advertising, allowing little or no space for freedom of expression (Klein 399). Oliver's project faces this situation by enabling a form of virtual culture jamming which converts any billboard-crowded plaza into an unparalleled exhibition space. Using AR technology, the artists have developed a system that enables anyone with a camera phone, smartphone or the customised "artvertiser binoculars" to record and substitute any billboard advertisement with a modified image. The user can therefore interact with her environment, first by observing and being aware of the presence of these commercial spaces and later on by inserting her own creations or those of other artists. By establishing a connection to the Internet, the modified billboard can be posted on sites like Flickr or YouTube, generating a constant feedback between the real location and the Net. Gregory Chatonsky's concept of the Flußgeist, which I mentioned earlier, is also present in these works, visually displaying the data on top of a real environment. Again, the user is placed in a passive situation, as a receptor of the information that is displayed in front of her, but in this case the connection with reality is made more evident. Furthermore, the perception of the environment minimises the awareness of the fragmentary nature of the information generated by the flow of data. Embodying In her introduction to the data visualisation section of her book Digital Art, Christiane Paul stresses the fact that data is “intrinsically virtual” and therefore lacking a particular form of manifestation: “Information itself to a large extent seems to have lost its 'body', becoming an abstract 'quality' that can make a fluid transition between different states of materiality” (Paul 174). Although data has no “body”, we can consider, as Paul suggests, any object containing a particular set of information to be a dataspace in its own. In this sense, a tendency in working with the Internet dataflow is to create a connection between the data and a physical object, either as the end result of a process in which the data has been collected and then transferred to a physical form, or providing a means of physically reshaping the object through the variable input of data. The objectification of data thus establishes a link between the virtual and the real, but in the context of an artwork it also implies a particular meaning, as the following examples will show.Fig. 5: Gregory Chatonsky, Le Registre - The Register (2007). Book shelf and books. Photo: Pau Waelder. In Le Registre [The Register] (2007), Gregory Chatonsky developed a software application that gathers sentences related to feelings found on blogs. These sentences are recorded and put together in the form a 500-page book every hour. Every day, the books are gathered in sets of 24 and incorporated to an infinite library. Chatonsky has created a series of bookshelves to collect the books for one day, therefore turning an abstract process into an object and providing a physical embodiment of the murmur of data that I have described earlier [Fig.5: Le Registre]. As with L'Attente, in this work Chatonsky elaborates on the concept of Flußgeist, by “listening” to a specific set of data (in a similar way as in Hansen and Rubin's Listening Post) and bringing it into salience. The end product of this process is not just a meaningless object but actually what makes this work profoundly ironic: printing the books is a futile effort, but also constitutes a borgesque attempt at creating an endless library of something as ephemeral as feelings. In a similar way, but with different intentions, Jens Wunderling brings the online world to the physical world in Default to Public (2009). A series of objects are located in several public spaces in order to display information extracted from users of the Twitter network. Wunderling's installation projects the tweets on a window or prints them in adhesive labels, while informing the users that their messages have been taken for this purpose. The materialisation of information meant for a virtual environment implies a new approach to the concept of ambiance as described previously, and in this case also questions the intimacy of those participating in social networks. As the artist puts it: "In times of rapid change concerning communication behavior, media access and competence, the project Default to Public aims to raise awareness of the possible effects on our lives and our privacy" (Wunderling 155). Fig. 6: Moisés Mañas, Stock (2009). Networked installation. Photo: Moisés Mañas. Finally, in Stock (2009), Moisés Mañas embodies the flow of data from stock markets in an installation consisting of several trench coats hanging from automated coat hangers which oscillate when the stock values of a certain company rise. The resulting movement of the respective trench coat simulates a person laughing. In this work, Mañas translates the abstract flow of data into a clearly understandable gesture, providing at the same time a comment on the dynamics of stock markets [Fig.6: Stock]. Mañas´s project does not therefore simply create a physical output of a specific information (such as the stock value of a company at any given moment), but instead creates a dynamic sculpture which suggests a different perception of an otherwise abstract data. On the one hand, the trenchcoats have a ghostly presence and, as they move with unnatural spams, they remind us of the Freudian concept of the Uncanny (Das Umheimliche) so frequently associated with robots and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the image of a person laughing, in the context of stock markets and the current economical crisis, becomes an ironic symbol of the morality of some stockbrokers. In these projects, the ambience is brought into attention by generating a physical output of a particular set of data that is extracted from certain channels and piped into a system that creates an embodiment of this immaterial flow. Yet, as the example of Mañas's project clearly shows, objects have particular meanings that are incorporated into the artwork's concept and remind us that the visualisation of information in data art is always discretionary, shaped in a particular form in order to convey the artist's intentions. Beyond the Buzz The artworks presented in this article revealt that, beyond the murmur of sentences culled from chats and blogs, the flow of data on the Internet can be used to express our difficult relationship with the vast amount of information that surrounds us. As Mitchell Whitelaw puts it: “Data art reflects a contemporary worldview informed by data excess; ungraspable quantity, wide distribution, mobility, heterogeneity, flux. Orienting ourselves in this domain is a constant challenge; the network exceeds any overview or synopsis” (Information). This excess is compared by Lev Manovich with the Romantic concept of the Sublime, that which goes beyond the limits of human measure and perception, and suggests an interpretation of data art as the Anti-Sublime (Manovich 11). Yet, in the projects that I have presented, rather than making sense of the constant flow of data there is a sort of dialogue, a framing of the information under a particular interpretation. Data is channeled through the artworks's interfaces but remains as a raw material, unprocessed to some extent, retrieved from its original context. These works explore the possibility of presenting us with constantly renewed content that will develop and, if the artwork is preserved, reflect the thoughts and visions of the next generations. A work constantly evolving in the present continuous, yet also depending on the uncertain future of social network companies and the ever-changing nature of the Internet. The flow of data will nevertheless remain unstoppable, our ambience defined by the countless interactions that take place every day between our divided self and the growing number of machines that share information with us. References Agre, Phil. “Living Data.” Wired 2.11 (Nov. 1994). 30 April 2010 ‹http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.11/agre.if.html›. Chatonsky, Gregory. “Flußgeist, une fiction sans narration.” Gregory Chatonsky, Notes et Fragments 13 Feb. 2007. 28 Feb. 2010 ‹http://incident.net/users/gregory/wordpress/13-flusgeist-une-fiction-sans-narration/›. ———. “Le Zeitgeist et l'esprit de 'nôtre' temps.” Gregory Chatonsky, Notes et Fragments 21 Jan. 2007. 28 Feb. 2010 ‹http://incident.net/users/gregory/wordpress/21-le-zeigeist-et-lesprit-de-notre-temps/›. Giordano, Carlo. Carlo Zanni. Vitalogy. A Study of a Contemporary Presence. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2005. Hansen, Mark, and Ben Rubin. “Listening Post.” Cyberarts 2004. International Compendium – Prix Ars Electronica 2004. Ed. Hannes Leopoldseder and Christine Schöpf. Ostfildern: Hate Cantz, 2004. 112-17. ———. “Babble Online: Applying Statistics and Design to Sonify the Internet.” Proceedings of the 2001 International Conference on Auditory Display, Espoo, Finland. 30 April 2010 ‹http://www.acoustics.hut.fi/icad2001/proceedings/papers/hansen.pdf›. Jevbratt, Lisa. “Projects.” A::minima 15 (2003). 30 April 2010 ‹http://aminima.net/wp/?p=93&language=en›. Klein, Naomi. No Logo. [El poder de las marcas]. Barcelona: Paidós, 2007. Manovich, Lev. “Data Visualization as New Abstraction and Anti-Sublime.” Manovich.net Aug. 2002. 30 April 2010 ‹http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/data_art_2.doc›. Paul, Christiane. Digital Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2003. 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The aim of this thesis is to investigate how parametrization of large-scale person movement data can contribute to describing the use of urban space. Given anonymous coordinate and timestamp data from a sensor observing an open-air mall, movement-based parameters are selected according to public life studies, behavioral mapping, and space syntax tools. The thesis aim is operationalized by answering how well the parametrizations perform in capturing urban space use, as well as investigating how the use is described when applying the parameterized data in selected urban space use tools. Also, the parameterized data are evaluated as time series to investigate possible further understanding of urban space use. The parametrization performance is evaluated by accuracy and F1-score and time series forecasts are evaluated by root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE). The results indicate a parametrization accuracy of 93% or higher, while a high yet fluctuating F1 -score indicates that the parameterizations might be sensitive to imbalanced data, and that accuracy alone might not be sufficient when evaluating urban data. The parameterized data applied in the selected urban space use tools highlights the granularity achieved from sensor-based data. In the time series analysis, a Facebook Prophet forecast model is implemented, with an MAE of 8.6% and RMSE of 11.7%, outperforming a seasonal naïve forecast implementation with an MAE of 14.1% and RMSE of 18.8%. The thesis finds that time series modelling adds to understanding patterns and changes of use over time and that the approach could be developed further in future studies. In answering how the urban space is used, the thesis develops a new methodology. This methodology combines human-scale understanding of urban space use with large-scale data, generating citizen passive feedback.
Vikten av att förstå hur en plats, eller ett stadsrum, faktiskt används härstammar ur det faktum att användningen ofta avviker från vad som var planerat. Genom en utökad förståelse för användningen av en plats går det exempelvis att anpassa platsens utformning efter faktisk användning. För att uppnå denna djupare förståelse finns flera olika tillvägagångssätt. Ett sätt är att använda de analoga teorier och verktyg som under lång tid har utvecklats av arkitekter och stadsplanerare, med avsikt att förstå sig på människors beteenden i olika stadsrum. Dessa urbana analysverktyg innefattar exempelvis ramverk för att kartlägga människors aktivitet. Ett annat sätt är att analysera stora datamängder för att utvinna generella rörelsemönster eller detaljerade trender. I denna uppsats presenteras en metod som kombinerar dessa två tillvägagångssätt i syfte att väva in de analoga teoriernas mänskliga utgångspunkt med de möjligheter som uppstår vid analys av stora datamängder. Genom att utveckla algoritmer kan rörelse-baserad information utvinnas, eller parametriseras, ur data från människors rörelse. Metoden innebär i kontexten av denna studie således en parametrisering av rörelse-data från en sensor uppsatt på shoppinggatan Kompassen i Göteborg. Urvalet av parametriseringar har baserats på de urbana analysverktygen. Detta sammanfattas i studiens övergripande syfte: att undersöka hur parametrisering av storskalig rörelsedata kan bidra till att förklara användningen av stadsrum. För att uppnå detta syfte besvaras tre frågeställningar. Först utvärderas hur väl det parametriserade rörelsedatat kan fånga upp användningen av stadsrum. Sedan undersöks hur användningen gestaltas genom att det parametriserade datat appliceras i utvalda urbana analysverktyg. Till sist analyseras datat som tidsserier i syfte att undersöka hur en förståelse över tid kan öka förståelsen för användningen av stadsrum. Genom att utgå från rörelsedata utvanns personers hastighet, startpunkt, och destination. Vidare parametriserades klasserna butiksinteraktion, grupptillhörighet, och stillastående i enlighet med de urbana analysverktygen. Vid utvärdering av dessa tre klasser visar studiens resultat att användningen av stadsrummet fångas upp till hög grad och uppnår åtminstone 93% i precision. Dock visar resultaten även att träffsäkerheten minskar ju mer obalanserat datat är. Detta innebär att ju lägre frekvent en klass är i datat desto svårare är den att fånga upp.    När det parametriserade datat används i de urbana analysverktygen, visar resultaten att det utvunna datat bidrar med en högre upplösning som kan bana väg för ny förståelse för hur stadsrum används. Den högre upplösningen möjliggör även för tidsserieanalys av det parametriserade datat. Resultaten pekar på en mer detaljerad förståelse för trender och användningen av stadsrummet över tid. Till exempel implementeras verktyget Facebook Prophet som i detta fall prognostiserar andelen med grupptillhörighet. För en prognos på två veckor uppnås ett genomsnittligt absolutfel på 8.6%, vilket anses vara ett träffsäkert resultat. På så sätt medför möjligheten att prognostisera användning och identifiera avvikelser från trender ett ytterligare bidrag till förståelsen för hur platsen används. Tidsserieanalysen uppvisar stor potential och tolkningar från såväl tidsserierna som prognosmodeller har utrymme att vidareutvecklas. I framtida studier bör även algoritmer för fler aktivitetsbaserade parametrar, till exempel sittande eller samtalande, utvecklas. Uppsatsens fokus kretsar kring att skapa förståelse för hur ett stadsrum används och lämnar således frågan varför åt framtida studier, där resultat från denna studie kan fungera som viktigt underlag. Studiens metod tillför ett mänskligt perspektiv till stora datamängder och bidrar på så sätt till ett bredare underlag för hur stadsrum används. Med utgångspunkt i urbana analysverktyg har insamlad sensordata parametriserats till viktiga rörelse-baserade klasser. Detta underlag motsvarar en passiv återkoppling från användarna av stadsrummet som därigenom förklarar hur en plats faktiskt används.

Natural language summarization and other social media analytics tools enable a communication manager to rapidly browse through a large number of text documents authored by citizens and get a sense of their interests and opinions. However, this approach is rather passive and unidirectional because it does not allow proposing to the citizen to express their opinions on specific topics. Similarly, social media platforms allow a crowd of individuals to answer questions but not support a “one-to-many” dialogue, where the communication manager, acting on behalf of the public authorities, can interact with the crowd. In this chapter, the authors describe a software platform that aims to address this gap and describe the system envisioned in the FUPOL project.

E-Governance aims to provide high quality of government for citizens. It covers services, information delivery and interactive community / government communication. This goal can be achieved by adopting the ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) tools in the government web site´s design and contents. This communication channel allows a redefinition of the traditional role played by each one of the actors of the relation. The government as provider of: services, information, transparency and interactive communication. The citizens acting as active subjects with their government, using services, receiving information, controlling the government´s decisions and returning feedback to them. This feedback includes opinions, complaints and suggestions delivered by the web sites’ interactive tools. This research surveyed if the implementation of ICT tools regarding national and international norms and regulations for web sites development and content, increases the fulfillment of the key concepts of e-governance: e-democracy, e-services, e-transparency and active and passive communication. 30 local government web sites of Argentine were analyzed by checking if they implemented the ICT tools expressed by the seven basic concepts of design and contents: Navigability, Veracity, Friendliness, Functionality, Accessibility, Usability and Information through 152 weighed aspects that fulfill these seven concepts. The analysis of the score obtained by the web sites showed their e-governance development level and what aspects they have to implement to improve e-governance quality.

Many small cities and towns in rural states such as Indiana are crossed by arterial highways. The local traffic on these roads, particularly vulnerable road users, face the excessive risk of injury and death. This danger is amplified with local land development, driveways, and on-street parking in town centers. This report presents an Indiana study of the speeding problem on arterial roads passing through small communities. Past research on various countermeasures suitable for the studied conditions were identified and the connection between speed reduction and safety improvements was investigated in a sample of Indiana small towns. Promising speed-reduction measures include speed feedback signs and converging chevrons with speed limit legends marked on the pavement. Point-to-point enforcement is a modern and highly effective alternative that may be applicable on highways passing small towns if the through traffic prevails with limited interruptions. This report provides a method of evaluating the benefits of speed reduction in the studied conditions where the risk of severe injury and fatality is excessive to road users while the frequency of crashes is low. The method includes the proactive estimation of the economic benefit. The results indicate that both the local and through traffic on highways passing a small town benefit considerably from speed reduction even after accounting for the loss of time. An Excel spreadsheet developed in the study facilitates the calculations.