antidote collective

the real world

How do you encapsulate a single moment on earth? How do you quantify the human experience that exists during that moment, creating a record of global human history? Telephone conversations, emails, love letters, business trends? How do you present it?

Artist Jonathan Harris pondered these big notions and drew some interesting, very contemporary insights. “Ultimately I decided that news photographs do the best job of summarizing the stuff that matters on earth, on a very broad scale, at any given moment,” he says. That led to 10x10, a curious piece of new media art that aggregates and analyzes the top 100 words and images in the world every hour and displays them in an interactive ten-by-ten grid. (You may have already heard about it; within two days of its November 4 launch, it was the 10th most popular link on the web, according to one site. CNN and USA Today and others soon took it beyond the blogosphere.)

This information visualization project is a bit of Google News with a dash of Google Zeitgeist. It does what thousands of blogging news junkies do, but in a more structured and visual way. And more than just feeding the addiction, it puts this snapshot of our world into context, a larger — and with no human intervention, raw and objective — perspective. As the website points out, it’s “often moving, sometimes shocking, occasionally frivolous.” It’s reality — at least as reported by the global news media.

To create this hourly snapshot, 10x10 scans the international RSS feeds of several leading news organizations — Reuters, BBC and The New York Times, as of this writing — and an algorithm performs a weighted linguistic analysis on the text in the top stories to determine the hour’s most important words. The top 100 are culled, along with their corresponding images, and then displayed, in order of importance, in the grid. (It can look a bit like the childhood game of concentration, with all the cards revealed – many images are repeated throughout the grid). Additionally, each image is linked to the news stories from which it is pulled.

10x10 also compiles the top 100 words and pictures for every day, month and year, using the hourly data already gathered. In this sense, 10x10 is creating, based on prominent world news events, a “continuous patchwork tapestry of human life,” as the press release so poetically puts it.

“I see 10x10 as a piece of meta-photography, aggregating the world’s most important pictures into a single image,” he says. “[It] unifies the work of many individual photographers, working in many different places, photographing everything from the tragic to the frivolous.” Example: A photo of a group of praying Chinese may appear between one of car explosions (Nepalese rebels) and one of a computer screen (peer-to-peer networks). “When many images work together in the creation of a single meta-image, we see a more balanced picture of the world.”

Harris is currently on a one-year fellowship at Fabrica, provocative Italian clothing giant Benetton’s Communication Research Center (a “creative think tank, of sorts,” as he puts it). With a Princeton education in computer science and a background in visual arts, it took him just a couple of months to develop 10x10, using Perl, MySQL, PHP and Flash — a month to build the retrieval and analysis engine and a month for the front-end visualization. The most difficult part, he says, was deciding how to display the data. He experimented with a variety of design concepts before going with the grid.

But the grid is just one application; he feels the uses are countless and encourages others to use the data in their own non-commercial projects. All data are publicly accessible online, easily structured in a series of folders. (Details on the site — “For Developers” section.) Others, for example, are currently using 10x10’s data in projects ranging from screensavers to those skewing search results with a current news word.

Harris’ inbox has been flooded by emails from people around the world moved by its unique — and often upsetting — view of the world. One day in particular that moved the masses: the day Yasser Arafat died. “Most days, the grid is filled with a variety of images on all sorts of topics,” he reflects, “but every now and then something so important happens that the whole world pauses and looks. Arafat’s death was one such event, and for one day, 10x10 was covered almost entirely with pictures of him. Moments like that you know you’re watching history being made, and I find that quite powerful.”