Mayor Toni Harp, accompanied by Yale University World Fellows Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico, spent Tuesday morning unveiling City Hall’s newest exhibit — a project that synthesizes art and real-time data in an effort to capture the pulse of the Elm City.
The exhibit, “Human Ecosystems New Haven: The Digital Life of the City,” could permanently change the way the city prioritizes and approaches solutions to citizens’ problems and concerns.
According to Iaconesi, the project captures in real-time all public conversations occurring on social networks. Interactions that express feelings such as love, hate, anxiety and joy can be deciphered in 29 different languages, Iaconesi said, and then are visualized on a map that is not bound by ward or school district.
“The maps are not contained to census districts, either,” said Yale spokesman Michael Morand. “We all share common feelings like love, hate, anxiety and joy. This is a way to represent it. Social media offers us an opportunity to turn strangers into neighbors.”
Visitors to the City Hall exhibit will be able to look at digital maps based on real-time visualization. Feelings such as anxiety and joy will be color-coded. For example, a collection of red appearing over a specific neighborhood may mean that people are expressing similar emotions.
Iaconesi and Persico arrived at Yale in August. Since then, they’ve worked side by side not just with Yale faculty and students but also The Grove New Haven, city officials and other city organizations.
“The possibilities are endless,” Persico said in an earlier statement. “You can tap into human ecosystems and discover the emotions of an entire city.”
The project already is in effect in cities around the world, including Rome, Montreal, Cairo, Toronto and Sao Paolo. Iaconesi said he’s found people who have ideas for how to use the data. He mentioned meeting a homeless man after a presentation he and Persico gave at New Haven Free Public Library.
“He perfectly understood it,” Iaconesi said. “He told me, ‘OK pal, with this thing I am going to conquer the world.’”
Statements of grandeur aside, the man explained to Iaconesi how he planned to see if the data harvested from social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram would yield information about who is complaining about shoveling snow.
“He told me that with this information he can be able to see who is complaining and go shovel their snow for them,” Iaconesi said. “I can make some money, he said, and maybe involve a few friends and build a small company.
“What he told me is more meaningful than anything I could add at this point.”
Iaconesi’s previous work proves he knows how to navigate social media for a cause. The artist, robotics engineer, designer and hacker from Italy was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2012. He took his digitized medical records, found a way to make them easier to understand and posted them to his artisopensource.net website. Iaconesi then was able to interact with roughly 60 neurosurgeons, neurologists and radiologists who offered suggestions for surgery and treatment.
His tumor was successfully removed.
Inspired by his experience, Iaconesi now wants to see how cities can benefit from similar crowdsourcing. But New Haven’s initiative won’t be driven by posing questions to the public online but rather by sitting back and observing what people are saying during the course of the day.
“If you look on social networks, people are saying incredible amounts of things,” Iaconesi said.
Transportation, Traffic and Parking Director Doug Hausladen said the project, if embraced, could be used to help every city department become better.
“What this project means for us is it’s one extra level of comprehensive planning that we can use as a tool in order to make people’s lives better,” he said. “Our departments are being challenged to use this tool. The mayor is pushing for results-based accountability. For us to do that as department heads, we needed more data.”
Michael Cappello, director of the Yale University World Fellows program, said working on a project like this helps strengthen the connection between the university and the city.
“We’ve found that the fellows are as grateful to come to New Haven as they are for the intellectual benefits at Yale,” he said.
Iaconesi pointed out the data the project is harvesting is the same data being collected online by advertisers, website developers and possibly even the National Security Agency.
Harp said she hopes the project’s results encourage more citizens to use social media.
“This will help improve our city,” she said. “We’re going to use this to make New Haven better.”
The public exhibit will be available for viewing through the end of business on Friday. For more information, visit www.artisopensource.net.
©2014 the New Haven Register (New Haven, Conn.)
