Loads of love came to New Haven Tuesday — along with heapings of joy, hate, and anxiety — in the form of mapped social-network data designed to help the city make “smarter” policy decisions.
Got it?
Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico can explain.
They explained it for a gathering of public officials at an opening of an exhibit at City Hall of a series of “human ecosystem” maps of New Haven, drawn from a study of what people in town post on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and other social-media sites. Harp administration officials said they will use the couple’s work as a springboard to report to the community in depth, on an ongoing basis, about how well government is performing and how people feel about it.
You might not have noticed, but Iaconesi and Persico, who hail from Rome, have been studying our city — and our public social-media postings — for four months now. They’ve been in town as Yale World Fellows. He’s a self-described “interaction designer, robotics engineer, artist, hacker,” and she, “an expert in participatory policies and digital inclusion … artist and writer.” They used computer algorithms to analyze the language of social-media postings, then map geographic clusters of responses by subject. Eventually those maps appear not in static displays in City Hall, but in interactive form on a computer, through which a city official or an everyday citizen can explore in depth who’s, say, frustrated with traffic and where in town, how many other people feel that way, what language they’re using, on a large scale.
Sort of like New Haven’s SeeClickFix on steroids. Same goal: Give everybody a chance to weigh in on city life, to connect with other people, to open opportunities for collective action, to hold officials accountable.
Or as one write-up described the endeavor, capturing all that grassroots information “and processing it to extract meaningful understandings of the many points of view in a city. It can teach citizens, students, researchers, designers, administrations, organizations and companies how to use this data in positive, interesting, participatory, civic, poetic and beautiful ways.”
Persico and Iaconesi (pictured) call it creating a “human ecosystem.” They’ve done that in cities from Rome and Istanbul to Montreal and Detroit. During their stay in New Haven, they held workshops at the Grove on Chapel Street and the public library to walk people through ways to use this kind of data.
At Tuesday’s event, Iaconesi told a story about a homeless man who approached him after a presentation at the Free Public Library.
“He told me, ‘OK pal, with this thing I’m going to conquer the world.’
“I said, ‘What do you mean?’
“‘OK, you know that snow is coming.’
“‘Yes, I know snow is coming …’
“And he said, ‘With this thing, I will be able to see whoever is complaining about snow, and I will go shovel the snow for them. So I make some money. And maybe I can bring along a few friends of mine. Maybe we can build a small company, organization, for snow shoveling …’”
That, Iaconesi said, is the point of his and Persico’s endeavor.
Afterward, city transit chief Doug Hausladen spoke about how the maps will help the Harp administration take the next steps toward “evidence-based” governing. He spoke of combining the project’s social-network data analysis with other metrics (studies, reports, Census figures) to feed into a dashboard displayed one day at City Hall measuring how well New Haven is performing on certain goals — promoting more biking rather than driving, for instance — and how people are feeling about the results.
Currently, Hausladen said, he will monitor social networks in his free time to discover New Haveners’ transit concerns. For instance, earlier this year a New Haven Register reporter posted a Twitter message about wishing she could find an alternative to driving on Route 34 to get to the paper’s (former) Sargent Drive plant. Hausladen sent her an alternative idea, steering her to Howard Avenue, then over the Church Street bridge to Long Wharf.
“Now I can have a map of everyone complaining about traffic,” Hausladen remarked. “Imagine what I can do!”
To which Persico noted that the data can be mined not just to monitor complaints, but to explore “possibilities” by connecting people who have similar interests.
Mayor Harp embraced the idea of weaving the duo’s work into city government’s daily operations. “It’s really important for us to know how people feel about” government’s performance, she said.
Paul Bass Photo
At the end of Tuesday’s event, Iaconesi and Perscio presented Harp with a sculpture displaying their analysis of the changes in New Haveners’ social-network postings this fall about their curiosity and happiness.
Meanwhile, people who want to play with the data, rather than just look at the static heat maps on display at City Hall, can do so at an interactive closing party beginning at 4 p.m. Friday at the Yale Center for Engineering Innovation and Design, 14 Prospect St.