Michelle Gallen :: Blog :: Photosynth - knowledge scraping...

http://www.liquidelearning.com/2007/06/photosynth-knowledge-scraping.h

I've just watched this video from the TED talks (after reading Donald Clark's post). It's Microsoft's Blaise Aguera y Arcas explaining a fantastic new technology - Photosynth, which is described as 'a monumental piece of software capable of assembling static photos into a synergy of zoomable, navigatable spaces'.

Watch it. You must. It's amazing! (and yes it's Microsoft. And Blaise is described as an 'acquisition').

But think about the implications of such an amazing technology...OK...it's so cool that we can create a virtual Notre Dame cathedral just from the knowledge scraped from Flickr photos...but it does make me wonder what sort of creations it might make of me...let's say if someone scraped all known digital photographs of me, taken at every wedding, leaving do, birthday party and reunion from the 21st century, I'd say a fairly interesting but utterly unrepresentative portrait might emerge. I guess buildings don't tend to wobble, no matter how much red wine they contain...

Interesting thing I'd like to see...a photo portrait of a famous dead person, scraped from every public photo ever taken...let's see Kurt Cobain, Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana please.

But all this is 2D and 3D interpretations of our seen world. If we can snap it digitally, it seems we can make it cool, sexy, interesting.

So what happens all our world's invisible stuff? Our emotions? How we think? The ways we learn? How we speak, communicate?

Watch the video. You'll get a brief glimpse of Bleak House as a novel laid out in columns of data...we can zoom right into the tiny pixels of the print. It made me think...

What I'd love to see a language montage...a way of identifying words according to how, when and where they're used. A way of charting the emotion, the usage, the power of language. A way of zooming into the 'pixels' of meaning and nuance.

I guess though that a language montage is particular to each person. We don't use the same words or phrases to express the same things.

This links (tenuously I know) into an idea I had about recording a language learner's conversations for a week or month or so, and analysing the results to provide the learner with the language they need and use.

But I digress. Watch. The. Video.