Apr 15, 2014
The Principles of Datalove — Audiomashup
Some years ago the Telecomix crew came up with the term datalove and wrote an according manifesto (see here for more details):
Love data
Data is essential
Data must flow
Data must be used
Data is neither good nor bad
There is no illegal data
Data is free
Data can not be owned
No man, machine or system shall interrupt the flow of data
Locking data is a crime against datanity
Love data
I use the term datalove quite often when referring to the free culture or open data movement. About two years ago I had the idea to create a voice mashup from the text and recorded various female friends reading the text. In order to give the mashup an electronic, digital feeling I alienated the voices a bit over an ambient electronic track (2012 by pielkor, CC-BY 3.0).
At the time, two years ago, the result was not like I imagined and I wasn’t satisfied. So I didn’t release it online. Yesterday I listened to the track again and was quite surprised. It was by far not as bad as I recalled it. This angers me somehow. I have a lot of stuff, video interviews, photos, software, visualizations, which I haven’t released because I was unsatisfied with the quality, got aware of technical shortcomings whilst working on the project or realized how it could have been done better. In part, I am also trying to avoid giving other people a possibility to attack my own work. Today I think it was stupid not to release projects like this and I regret it. It was a nice project and I should let other people decide if they can use it or not.
I have to thank Saron, Zenib, Sonja, Kate, Amrei, Natty, Jenny, Elizabeth and Lisa without whom this mashup would not have been possible. The track is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 International Attribution license (CC-BY 4.0).
The student group I participate in is called datalove as well, ulmAPI is an open data project by the datalove group.
