Talk on “Context, Content, and Community: Inventing the Future of Mobile Media” at the DUB Meeting June 4, 2008

“Context, Content, and Community: Inventing the Future of Mobile Media”

Marc Davis, Chief Scientist, Yahoo! Connected Life

With the advent of the cameraphone as a ubiquitous platform for media production, sharing, and use, we have the opportunity to reinvent media participation on the personal, social, and global levels. We can now gather and correlate media metadata about the spatiotemporal context and social community of media capture and use to enable people around the world to create, describe, find, share, and remix media content. To do so, we are engaged in the iterative design, development, and analysis of large scale "sociotechnical" systems that will ultimately connect billions of humans, computational devices, and media assets into a global processing network. However, computational models of information processing have largely not availed themselves of humanistic and social scientific models of how information is constructed, interpreted, shared, accessed, and reused by embodied humans in spatial, temporal, social, and topical contexts. The technological challenge of analyzing, routing, and retrieving media content becomes solvable in new ways, when informed by an understanding of what information is, and where and how it is processed by human beings in the world. Simply put, when technologists come to understand that the meaning of the data we process is not in the data itself, but elsewhere, then better technologies can be created. By interacting with the affordances of physical places, temporal events, and social networks and norms, human beings using mobile media devices create patterns of activity, the analysis of which can help us predict what people might create, want, and share in a given spatial, temporal, social, and topical context.

This talk will describe the concepts and methods we have developed to create interdisciplinary innovation in mobile media research and design at Garage Cinema Research in the UC Berkeley School of Information, the UC Berkeley Center for New Media, Yahoo! Research Berkeley, and Yahoo! Inc. We will also demonstrate examples of innovations we have created in mobile social media: our Mobile Media Metadata 1 and 2 projects from UC Berkeley which pioneered context-aware mobile media tagging, sharing, content recognition, and data analysis and visualization; ZoneTag, context-aware mobile media tagging and sharing integrated into the Flickr photo sharing service; TagMaps, which enables the visualization and exploration of geocoded tags and photos on Flickr maps, and oneConnect, a forthcoming context-aware mobile social aggregator that reinvents mobile communications and social connection.

Official Website: http://dub.washington.edu/calendar