Open data abets the rise of the citizen-analyst

Author: Alexis Madrigal
Posted: August 20th, 2008 @ 10:37am
Info: bio / all posts
Tags: citizen-analyst, data, ships

Jay Rosen, the celebrated journalism professor at NYU, Twittered Monday: “The natural authority of any reporter, pro or amateur, celebrated or unknown, lies with, ‘I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it.’”

As a reporter who reports on issues global and virtual, he got me thinking about where ‘there’ could be in my beat. My value as a reporter, I realized, is actually in defining the location — mapping — where the news lies stranded in interwebs.

But it’s not just reporters who create value detailing what’s happening out in the real world. It’s a big place and it’s easy even for the world’s largest boats to slink around unnoticed out there. That’s why the New York Times wrote that Petro-Logistics “can sway world oil markets,” even as BusinessWeek tells us it’s just “a tiny company that operates upstairs from a grocery store in Geneva, Switzerland.” The researchers’ main strategy? Just knowing which oil tankers are loitering around which ports.

Industry analysts, in general, generate authority by saying, “I know a lot of people who were in a lot of theres. Let me sell you about it.” They create value by having data about the real world in a spreadsheet. The rest is just marketing (or futurism without the imagination). But we sort of have to listen to their prognostications because we don’t have that spreadsheet which turned a lot of “theres” into a model of how a slice of the world has been working.

(We know so little, really, about our world in aggregate. What’s amazing about the hullabaloos that result from earnings reports by corporations is that their blustering executives are actually telling people what happened months in the past. It’s just that no one can actually figure out what happened until the companies disclose the information.)

But what if resources begin to arise that revealed data about the world’s industrial and commercial bowels? To free the information about infrastructure, we need some kind of citizen eyes to bring data to the people, so we can begin to sort and understand it.

And that’s where the world’s most underrated mash-up comes into play.

MarineTraffic.com uses International Maritime Organization-mandated transponder signals to track every single ship within 20 miles of one of their receivers. Multiply by the world and they’ve got a bead on some 3,500 ships at any given time.

Based at the University of the Aegean in Greece, they’ve managed to attain coverage over large swaths of the world by asking people to put up a huge antenna somewhere, connect it to a receiver, and donate the data to the project. They feed that information through a Google Map and voila: you can look out your office window in downtown San Francisco, see a ship, and find out what it’s called, where it’s coming from, and where it’s going.

Aside from being totally awesome, MarineTraffic provides a real-time source of data about the world’s shipping industry, even its individual ships with a surprising amount of detail. It’s not enough detail to turn anyone who wants to be into a citizen-analyst, but it’s a start. Certainly one could make some predictions about how the Port of Oakland was doing.

And that’s important because first-person accounts, reportage by pros or amateurs, can lose out to the higher authorities of experts, researchers, and analysts who can claim the weight of data, of not just one there, but many theres.

Public data sources, particularly ones gathered by groups of people with open collection processes, evens the power field between decision-makers and those affected by the decision, allowing for analyses that haven’t been carefully shaped to support a policy or business directive.

The best case scenario is that citizen-analysis of open, crowdsourced data could allow for a new era of belief in fact at exactly the time when trust in experts (people whose thoughts are almost facts) is waning.