a sense of satisfaction to see someone i’ve been helping get on the research ladder accepted to a workshop and the paper we co-wrote going into the acm archive.
In order to sense the mood of a city, we propose first looking at festivals. In festivals such as Glastonbury or Burning Man we see temporary cities where the inhabitants are engaged afresh with their environment and each other. Our position is that not only are there direct equivalences between larger festivals and cities, but in festivals the phenomena are often exaggerated, and the driving impulses often exploratory. These characteristics well suit research into sensing and intervening in the urban experience. To this end, we have built a corpus of sensor and social media data around a 18,000 attendee music festival and are developing ways of analysing and communicating it.
“Sensing Festivals as Cities”, a position paper for ‘SenCity: uncovering the hidden pulse of a city’ workshop, accepted for publication in UbiComp '13 conference proceedings.