foe romeo

Flickr Squared Photo Collaborative Poster project

  phyllo_rings_licensed_3145_1k 
  Originally uploaded by jbum.

This would have to be the loveliest and most persuasive information visualisation I've ever come across. jbum, a member of the always-delightful squared circle group on Flickr has created a series of mosaics from the images sent to the group's photo pool.

The image above was made by "compositing 2600 photographs and arranging them in a fibonacci spiral, a form commonly seen in plants, such as sunflowers and pinecones" and then overlaying the current licensing status of each image: "The red band indicates unlicensed photos. The purple band indicates photos which are licensed, but have a 'No Derivatives' clause. The photos in the center are useable."

jbum wants to produce a poster of his mosaic but first needs the contributors of the original images to re-license their work. Here's his call to action.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

And wow.

(Via Paul Key on Pixelbox, who introduced it thus: "Insanity squared on a flickr tip. Prepare eyes for infinity.")

Update: Apparently they've gone from 1437 to 1894 licensed photos in less than a week.

July 2005 Update: The Flickr Collaborative Posters are now available to order. Choose from Flickrverse, Day In the Life Of..., Squared Circle Peach and Squared Circle Phyllotaxy.

Harry Potter fandom

Henry Jenkins offers a media literacy perspective on high school aged kids' Harry Potter fan fiction:

Literary purists, of course, might question the wisdom of having kids develop as creative writers in this nontraditional way. But while there is certainly value in writing about one's own experiences, adolescents often have difficulty stepping outside themselves and seeing the world through other people’s eyes. Their closeness to Harry and his friends makes it possible to get some critical distance from their own lives and think through their concerns from a new perspective.

And writing about Harry offers them something else, too: an audience with a built-in interest in the stories—an interest that would be difficult to match with stories involving original fictional characters. The power of popular culture to command attention is being harnessed at a grassroots level to find a readership for these emerging storytellers.

From MIT Technology Review's Why Heather Can Write