Obama Inauguration | Space and Time

Obama Inauguration | Space and Time

Jan 23

Obama election and consequent take over as President of the US are among the top historic moments of the young century and certainly the biggest of 2009 – hope it is only surpass by something even greater, not crises or war, or both -. So, his inauguration was a key point and something to remember for a long long long time.
It made Internet streaming records, mass live viewing on whole world and a lot of excitement – shared also by me, of course..

Along the work and experiments that I’ve been doing with Flickr photos over Google maps, I thought it might be a good idea to try, somehow, to capture that day: Obama Inauguration day!What I’ve came up with was as application that has two fundamental views: Space and Time.

I gather every photo from that entire day, within a 1.6 km (about 1 mile) of the center of the action in WASHINGTON (ok, there is a limit of 2000 photos, but at this time, there aren’t that much photos). That should be the most important action area of this history event. Then, I try to present that information (that is massive) so anyone not present can understand the excitement, happiness and hope that Obama election and inauguration was.

On the first dimension – Space – all photos are cluster on a very simple algorithm and on each cluster, it’s presented the five most interesting photos and a star in the cluster geo position. The star size is equal to the important – this means, the number of photos – of that spot/area.Clicking a cluster will display those top photos on the bottom in a bigger format. To see a photo, just click on them.

On – Time – I also cluster the photos over time with a similar simple algorithm. They are presented in an animation fashion, flashing a light on the place EACH photo was taken with the correct sequence of the time they were taken.This will appear – I hope – like you were really were there on a balloon seeing the photos flash in fast motion.On the bottom, a slide show appear with a time line (so you know the cluster time and duration) and the main/most interesting photos of that small period of time.

But it is always better to see for yourself:

I would appreciate a lot any comments, feedback or your thoughts over this experiment on this historic day: Obama Inauguration!

Hope Obama can transform even just a little part of the hope we gave people to actions and great consequences. He just seems to be very bright and have a great deal of good sense and rational thought, so all points to a the best direction.