I was at the British Library yesterday for the launch of the Growing Knowledge exhibition of innovative research techniques. One installation has been built by Steve and Ben at CASA and is a real-life version of the Tweet-o-Meters (which were also the inspiration and technology for the Bike-o-Meters I mentioned yesterday.)
The installation has dials for nine cities around the world, showing the current level of Twitter activity (i.e. geo-located tweets) in these locations.
I love the “1930s retro” design of the installation. It is notable that all the other installations in the exhibition involve computer screens, in several cases these are used to display old maps (e.g. the New York Public Library rectification service) or historical paintings (using a Microsoft Surface screen.) I love the irony that the exhibition that is showing the data right now, i.e. coming live off Twitter from around the world, is the one which doesn’t involve any computer screens at all – although they are of course computer-controlled behind the scenes.
There’s something wonderfully organic about seeing the needles go ricochetting off the ends of the dials, as sudden bursts of tweets from a particular city come in. I hope the distinctly analogue technology survives. I think we get the work when the exhibition closes next summer. I’m pretty sure, when Steve’s not looking, it will be quite straightforward to “retro-fit” it for a physical monitor of bike share schemes. 😉
Steve has posted some more pictures from the exhibition, including some behind-the-scenes shots.
