Last week, Henry, Erin, Kelly, Deb (who is back as a staff researcher), and I had our very first meeting to talk about our new Teachers' Strategy Guide project, which will be all about mapping...A map of the internet circa 2003 showing the connections between different internet routers, from the Opte Project.

Randall Munroe's 2007 map of the internet, from xkcd.

Because the meeting was so interesting and I'm so excited about this project, I thought I'd blog about it. You know how much we NMLers like to keep everyone updated on our projects at every phase. Sometimes watching things unfold is the coolest part!

An Afternoon with Jonathan Harris at his Brooklyn studio.
(The content of this interview will be available in video chapters on Project New Media Literacies Learning Library)

"Jonathan Harris has made projects about human desire, modern mythology, science, news, anonymity and language and also documented an Alaskan Eskimo Whale Hunt. He was commissioned by Yahoo! to build the world's largest time capsule, and by MoMA to build an interactive installation about online dating. He studied computer science at Princeton University, and was awarded a 2004 Fabrica fellowship. The winner of three Webby Awards, his work has also been recognized by AIGA, Ars Electronica, Print, ID Magazine, and the State of Vermont, has been featured by CNN, BBC, NPR, Reuters, Metropolis, The New York Times, USA Today, and Wired, and has been exhibited at Le Centre Pompidou (Paris), and MoMA (New York). He has given lectures all over the world, including at Google, Princeton and Stanford Universities, the TED Conference, and on Bhutanese television. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York."
 

An Afternoon with Jonathan Harris at his Brooklyn studio.

(The content of this interview will be available in video chapters on Project New Media Literacies Learning Library)

Earlier this month, Clement and I went to New York City to interview Jonathan Harris. A New York based artist, who combines elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling to explore and explain human world through designing systems.

What does the web look like? Somehow, millions of people and ideas are mashed together and create an intricate cluster... or is it more like a messy canvas? I wanted to share two projects that have fascinated me recently. Each of them represents the internet in different ways. Drawball is a site where anyone can spray paint their own little part of a huge circle of graffiti. Clusterball is a project that tries to show different pages from wikipedia as interconnected dots.