From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "David O'Toole" Subject: documentary filmmaking and reproducible research? Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2011 16:44:01 -0400 Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Return-path: Received: from [140.186.70.92] (port=60315 helo=eggs.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1PzEcW-00069w-GW for emacs-orgmode@gnu.org; Mon, 14 Mar 2011 16:44:05 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1PzEcU-0002Nf-TP for emacs-orgmode@gnu.org; Mon, 14 Mar 2011 16:44:04 -0400 Received: from mail-gw0-f41.google.com ([74.125.83.41]:39079) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1PzEcU-0002Nb-Qw for emacs-orgmode@gnu.org; Mon, 14 Mar 2011 16:44:02 -0400 Received: by gwaa12 with SMTP id a12so2571624gwa.0 for ; Mon, 14 Mar 2011 13:44:01 -0700 (PDT) List-Id: "General discussions about Org-mode." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Sender: emacs-orgmode-bounces+geo-emacs-orgmode=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: emacs-orgmode-bounces+geo-emacs-orgmode=m.gmane.org@gnu.org To: emacs-orgmode Mailinglist Greetings, org community. A while back I made two short (less than 10 minute) amateur documentary films. I used org-mode to outline everything, structure my notes and the many public domain texts/images I used, and coordinate the recording process for the voiceovers. I've also separately experimented with using org as an asset management system complete with binary attachments, Dublin Core metadata to keep track of (among other things) licensing information for assets used in video game development. I have some (somewhat disorganized) thoughts and references collected here: https://github.com/dto/ioforms/raw/master/ioforms.org I've just seen the documentary film "Inside Job", and then watched it over again, and listened to the voiceover commentary of the film's director and producer. They discussed using many gigantic, complex Word and Excel documents to organize the data they needed to make the film, and apparently emailing these big MS Office files around the world to coordinate the deep research the team were doing right up until the film was finished. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Job_(film) One of the most striking aspects of Inside Job is its effective use of animated diagrams with explanatory voiceover. By consistent use of terms, shapes, simple icons, and color-coding, the diagrams lead to some of the most effective moments of the film. Aside from many illustrative bar and line graphs, the filmmakers use "block-and-arrow" animations to explain the flows of money in what they call the "securitization food chain". An important part of the film are network analyses (identifying single people who serve or have served on multiple corporate boards of directors, or who went from a board of directors to a position at a regulatory agency regulating the same corporations, or identifying groups of people who served together on the same boards, and so on. I wonder what it might have been like if something like Gephi (http://gephi.org) had been used instead of Microsoft Excel. Apparently now there is also some information on use of the R language at the New York Times' graphics department. http://www.r-bloggers.com/amanda-cox-on-how-the-new-york-times-graphics-department-uses-r/ And perhaps people here have read arguments that David X. Li's famous statistical formula had a part to play in the debacle. So, what do people think of assembling free software so that anyone can make reproducibly-researched, remixable, crowd-sourced documentary films? Or even just research papers with some really nice animations? :) And use org-publish to throw the "source code" of the documentary on the internet for inspection and criticism? I'm seeing a common theme, of how software tools (whether MS Office, or org and R) become involved in the process of creating and then communicating the results of research. The government is already using stuff like link analysis to get information about the general public (to identify connections between members of Wikileaks, Anonymous) but it might be interesting to try the reverse, and use software to connect people who can then cooperate and share information, and perhaps discover connections or groups (cells?) of individuals who are connected across networks in academe, government, corporations, non-governmental organizations, large media institutions, and so on. Of course it doesn't have to be Julian Assange type intrigue, it could just be another fun thing to do with Orgmode. What do you think?