The ambitious and creative CityMurmur seeks to understand and visualize how media attention shapes and reshapes urban spaces. It monitors various media – newspapers, blogs, personal websites, etc. – to track and highlight how different parts of a city are being talked about. This information is used to create an atlas in real time featuring different maps of the same space based on news source, time, and theme, with topics like entertainment, religion, food, and breaking newspapers. Thus the atlas becomes a prism through to understand the way media attention represents all the different aspects of the city. “The goal of the project is to show how different media differently describe the urban space through the attention that is payed on each street of a city.”
The “atlas” is quite cool and nice to look at, one of those things that you could easily spend half a day playing around with. You can look at any street and see all of the various things that are being said about it from every point of view. CityMurmur first started with the city of Madrid last year, and launched in New Orleans this past summer. The CityMurmur project was presented yesterday, October 11th, at the Innovation Circus in Milan, where it was one of the winners for most innovative startup.