Tags and maps: fragmented mirrors
Five intense and exciting years have passed since I started collaborating with Antoni Abad on the zexe.net mobile communication projects. During this time, Antoni has mostly been “on the field”, directly interacting with participants, endlessly negotiating with all kinds of institutions or looking for new collaborations with groups and collectives. As for me, I’ve been almost always sitting here, in what I have ended up calling “the control tower”. Using any available computer, from various parts of the world, I programmed, corrected, monitored and maintained the software engine that allows zexe.net to exist on the Internet. I set up my “control tower” in all sorts of places: my current office in Paris, many airport lobbies, a lost cybercafé on the Pacific shores in Mexico or a hotel right in Bombay’s city centre. I only need an Internet connection in order to work. And a bit of silence, although that is not always possible.
As I’m writing this text, a group of disabled people in Geneva, Switzerland, are drawing a map of accessibility to public space in their city. They do that by using mobile telephones with integrated cameras and GPS. These people simply take pictures of architectonic barriers or examples of adequate adaptations, and send them straight to a web page where they will be published a few seconds later, located as if by magic on the corresponding places on the map.
How do we achieve that? In this text, I would like to present a brief outline of the evolution of the zexe.net system, mostly from a technical perspective. As mentioned above, Antoni and I started this project five years ago. With hindsight, we can say today that it has evolved almost hand in hand with the breathtaking development of mobile communication technologies. When we started out in 2003, telephones with integrated cameras were a true novelty. In fact, the first telephone that we used was model 7650, the first Nokia with an integrated camera. We now use mobile telephones with integrated GPS localisation systems, devices that are still rare on the market. As for the web page that collects all that is sent by zexe.net participants, we can say that it already offered an open and participative model even before the invention of the term “Web 2.0”, which is so fashionable these days to describe World Wide Web applications that allow users to collaborate creatively and share information.
But let’s get started. Firstly, we will see in detail how photographs taken by zexe.net participants can be sent directly from the mobile phone to the web page, that is, without needing an intermediate step. Mobile telephone networks currently allow transmitting not only voice, but also data that are coded as digital signals. Moreover, telephone service providers offer the possibility to send short text (SMS) or multimedia (MMS) messages from a phone with access to a data network to an electronic mail address. We use precisely this possibility on zexe.net. If we examine the format of an e-mail, we can notice that it includes various important elements: sender’s and addressee’s addresses, date, text and, possibly, attachments. That was obviously an ideal format for our purposes. We therefore created an application in the zexe.net server in order to receive all the e-mails sent by the participants from their mobile phones, to separate all their elements and, depending on the sender or the addressee, put them in the corresponding places in a database. Thus participants only need to care about sending their texts, images, sounds or videos to the right destination address, using the tools provided by their own telephones. We did the first transmission tests in 2003 for the first zexe.net project in Madrid, which Antoni very suitably called “ensayoGENERAL"1. I must say that the first time that I managed to send a picture from the telephone to the web page was a moment of great excitement that I still remember. Unfortunately I’ve lost that first photograph, I may have erased it accidentally. In the project that followed ensayoGENERAL, called sitio*TAXI, the first project with “real” participants, we were quite probably the first users of the telephone data network in Mexico. When taxi drivers from Mexico City started transmitting on zexe.net, the network had only been installed for a few weeks. As expected, we had some technical issues. However, this did not stop the taxi drivers from sending over 7.000 photos.
The zexe.net website has a basic structure, which we have maintained since the inception of the project. It is divided into sections, which we call channels. Channels can be seen as containers, the function of which is to accumulate content that belongs to a specific theme or participant. Participants can choose the channel to which they wish to send their content, as each channel has its own e-mail address. Thus, each channel contains messages that are nothing else than the e-mail messages sent to its address. Therefore, each message can contain various elements: texts, images, sounds and videos.
All zexe.net projects have been structured around channels. When a new participant arrives, a new channel is created for his/her own use. Therefore, there are as many individual channels as participants, and these channels can contain all kinds of things: they are not limited to any particular theme, since what is sent to them entirely depends on their owners. However, there are also collective channels, dedicated to themes that are of interest to more than one participant. In Mexico City, channels were created for documenting the endless bureaucratic formalities that taxi drivers have to undergo in order to get their papers; collecting photos of their respective families; or narrating religious celebrations in Iztapalapa2. In each project, the collective channels tried to reflect the common interests and the shared willingness to show something. However, creating and maintaining these channels has always been slightly problematic, even when they were the result of consensus amongst participants, who discussed them during weekly meetings. First of all, clearly determining a shared theme can prove to be rather difficult, even for a small and relatively homogeneous group of people. In sitio*TAXI, some drivers drove their taxi legally (that is, with the required papers), while others did it illegally. Creating separate thematic channels for each group solved this potential conflict, but emphasized the existing divisions in the group from the very beginning of the project. Later on, with the young gypsy participants of canal*GITANO in Lleida, defining common themes was considerably disrupted by the group’s indecision and, to some extent, indiscipline. This is obviously not a reproach on the group, but rather an acknowledgement of its great thematic dispersiveness, mostly generated by the strong, almost anarchic, creative energy displayed by these youths. In other words, they simply wanted to send their photographs without thinking too much about collective themes or interests.
Maintaining the thematic coherence of collective channels was also somehow complicated. I can name a few concrete cases, such as the collective channels in canal*CENTRAL, a project with Nicaraguan immigrants made in Costa Rica, in which misplaced content was quite common. For example, there were pictures of the participants' lodgings on the channel PEGUE3, whereas they should actually be on VIVIENDA. Furthermore, the conceptual vicinity of the channels BACANAL, dedicated to “tico-nica”4 parties, and MARIMBA, dedicated to their music, meant that confusion between the two was on the agenda. There is nothing to blame the participants for; we rather see these confusions as a mistake in the way the zexe.net system was designed. For example: in canal*CENTRAL, 8 collective channels were created. If we add each participant's personal channel, this means that when sending a message, participants had to choose one address amongst 9 possible ones. It is obvious that the error margin can be rather high, especially if one hasn’t practiced much with the telephone. Moreover, if a participant takes the picture of a music band at a party, which channel should he/she send it to? Is it to channel MARIMBA or to channel BACANAL? We had to implement the possibility to move messages between various channels in order to solve these issues.
Finally, considering that each zexe.net channel has an associated e-mail address, we can see that in order to create a new channel the server administrator’s intervention is needed, as only he is authorised, for security reasons, to create new addresses on zexe.net. Therefore, creating channels was not a smooth process, as it introduced a hierarchical procedure between decision and action.
To overcome these limitations, we had to find a more dynamic way to manage common themes, and a way to allow their emergence during the transmission process itself, as opposed to a definite agreement that should depend, in order to be implemented, on the administrator’s intervention. How to make collective decision-making more flexible without falling into a chaos situation? Curiously, the solution was already there. From the very first version, the zexe.net system already included the possibility to associate “descriptors” to any content sent by the participants. Descriptors are simple keywords that can be used to classify things. We can also consider these descriptors as “themes” that include a number of contents associated to them. For example, the descriptor “adults” could be used to describe all the pictures where adults are featured. Thus “adults” naturally becomes a theme, and all the new images bearing this descriptor will fall into that category. Therefore, descriptors can be used to classify, group and search images. All very well, except that, unfortunately, it took us years to realise that this dynamic way to create collective themes was right under our nose. Instead of letting participants of sitio*TAXI, canal*GITANO, canal*INVISIBLE, canal*ACCESSIBLE, and canal*CENTRAL define and use their own descriptors, we persisted in building a dictionary defined in a "top-down" way, allowing only documentalists to apply it to the zexe.net content. In this way, we created a kind of distinctive taxonomy, divided into five categories: people, activities, spaces, objects and specific descriptors. With this categorization, we wanted to describe everything in the visible world… and we obviously fell short. In spite of this general taxonomy, some points of detail would always slip through. For example, a descriptor to be associated to images of religious rites was lacking in our activities category, We only noticed this omission after realising that this was an important issue for taxi drivers in Mexico City, the gipsy youths, and the immigrants of canal*CENTRAL. However, even after adding this descriptor, it was obvious that we would never achieve a complete and satisfactory taxonomy of the zexe.net universe. Well, not until – just before starting canal*MOTOBOY in Sao Paulo, Brazil – we made the very simple decision to leave the definition of the descriptors (and their association to content) in the hands of participants themselves. The results were a major surprise.
Motoboys are vital in the daily dynamics of Sao Paulo. They carry all sorts of messages on their motorcycles; the timeliness of the delivery of all sorts of documents and objects depends on their driving skills and speed. Antoni invited them to take part to zexe.net, suggesting that they chronicle, in a very open way, their daily lives on the web. However this time, besides sending photos, sounds and videos, motoboys had to assign them keywords, i.e. tags. They had to simply write the word (or the words, separated by commas) that could best describe what they had recorded, and send the whole thing to their personal channel on the web. In this way, personal vocabularies came out and, after aggregating and making them converge allowed the gradual emerge of certain common themes.
Tags are currently used in a large number of “Web 2.0” applications. Tagging can be defined as enriching digital or digitalised content with semantic information in the form of freely chosen words. The action of tagging is not subordinated to a controlled vocabulary or a predefined taxonomic structure, but is an essentially individual act of classification that is fundamentally related to the creation of meaning. But in spite of their individual nature, the aggregation of various people’s tags converges to become a common vocabulary known as folksonomy5. In this aggregation, one doesn’t only see tags belonging to personal vocabularies, but one can also identify those that occur most frequently, i.e. those that were used more often, or the most popular ones, or those that have been used by many people. To display a folksonomy on screen, including the most frequent or popular tags, the so-called tag clouds are regularly used. If we go to the channel DIAaDIA in canal*MOTOBOY, we can see the tag cloud created by the motoboys on the upper side of the screen. We can almost immediately notice the common themes which have emerged during more than a year of transmissions. The size of the tags is directly proportional to their popularity. Hence we can find “motos”, “reunião”, “trabalho”, “transito”, or (unfortunately) “acidente” as some of the main themes. The tags in canal*MOTOBOY introduce a great qualitative advantage in zexe.net: they allow common themes to emerge during the transmission process, and not necessarily from its beginning in the form of channels: the agreement on a simple word opens the door to new narrative possibilities. Tags also allow the inclusion of marginal themes, but perhaps the most important contribution that folksonomies have made to zexe.net is the inclusion of a subjective interpretation of the images. For an "external" viewer, a photo in canal*MOTOBOY may contain anonymous adults or children, male or female persons. But thanks to the tags that the motoboys associate to their photos, we know whether the people that appear before our eyes are "friends", "colleagues" or "family". Without these individual naming act, this valuable information would simply not be available. The subjectivity allowed by tagging adds to the richness to the projects by making them even more relevant for their participants, and more intelligible for the rest of us.
Tags are also being used in GENEVE*accessible. Participants use them to specify what they find in the city. However, there are important distinctions in comparison with canal*MOTOBOY: while the Sao Paulo project was totally open-ended, i.e. the description of the motoboys’ daily life, a specific goal is set for Geneva, which is to draw an accessibility map. Therefore, at the first meeting with the Genevan participants, they were asked to suggest a list of architectonic barriers. Hence tags such as “danger”, “déviations”, “entrées”, “escaliers”, “impossibilités”, “incivilités”, “marches”, “trottoirs”, “transports” and of course “bravo!”, since not everything has to be negative. The participants, who are experts in this domain, created this basic classification. Right now, these tags are appearing on their mobile phones, thanks to an application called GeoZexe, which was written by my colleague Lluís Gomez from the Hangar-Barcelona team. GeoZexe allows participants to choose the corresponding tag from a list, or to write a new one after taking a photo. Quite obviously, the vocabularies in Geneva are likely to be more limited than in Sao Paulo, which is explained by the very concrete purpose of this new project: showing fellow citizens the problems and the achievements in terms of urban infrastructure, adequacy and good citizenship.
Regarding the possibility of creating maps on zexe.net, I would simply like to tell an anecdote. Very shortly before starting canal*ACCESSIBLE in Barcelona, where a group of people in wheelchairs had to draw, like in Geneva, their city’s accessibility map, we realised that the GPS devices were not working. Close to despair, I found the only possible solution: I managed to obtain the geographic coordinates of a point on the map from a street name and number. That solution, however, meant that participants had to “handwrite” the addresses where they had taken each photo. This considerable effort did not stop them from finding more than 3.500 obstacles. I personally much admire the devotion of these Catalan participants, who were not discouraged by a technical limitation. Fortunately, things are working much better today in Geneva. Also thanks to the GeoZexe application, each photo taken by the participants already includes the latitude and longitude of the corresponding point, which allows to automatically locate them on a map.
Tags and maps allow us to take a look into the participants' activities, while allowing them to think about and plan their future actions. Tags and maps are models and regulators, portraits and mirrors. We believe that the projects on zexe.net are reflecting surfaces where participants can see themselves. These surfaces are certainly fragmented, but if we try to put the pieces together, we can also see and understand them a little better.
Eugenio Tisselli
zexe.net:un cartographie numérique du monde
Published by the Centre d'Art Comtemporain de Genève and Seacex, Geneva 2008
1 "General rehearsal"
2 A neighborhood in Mexico City where Easter celebrations are particularly intense.
3 “Pegue” is a slang word for “work”.
4 “Ticos” (Costa-Ricans) and “Nicas” (Nicaraguans)
5 The term “folksonomy” was used for the first time by Thomas Vander Wal in 2004, and became popular ever since. Vander Wal’s original text can be found at: http://www.vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html