3 Brooklyn media projects demo at NYC Media Lab’s Annual Summit

Downtown’s nonprofit, institutional research coalition, the NYC Media Lab, held its annual summit on Friday at the New School in Manhattan. The summit featured academics and newsmakers discussing ways in which they are innovating in the news and media space.

Here are a few Brooklyn-related notes from the presentations:

• R. Luke Dubois from NYU-Poly showed a few of his fascinating media/art projects, mostly related to romance. He’s made maps of the U.S., showing states color coded on continuums of loneliness, cynicism, kinkiness, etc. The project is called “A More Perfect Union.” This data is based on over 19 million online dating profiles that he’s downloaded. The project also shows the dominant word used in dating profiles for most cities in the country and many of the neighborhoods of New York (this reporter lives somewhere between “Kept” and “Fanatic”).
• David Carroll, of Glossy (which we wrote about here), debuted the new design for the site at the event. It loaded slowly, which is the risk you take during a live demo at a big event. One slick new feature he showed was the ability for users to turn the logos of magazines on or off as they browsed. The new beta version isn’t up yet, but readers can sign up to be notified when it is. Carroll explained that Glossy’s approach makes it an outlier in terms of unbundled but curated content, in the online media discovery landscape.
  

  Slide showing where Glossy.io fits on the news discovery continuum. (Photo by Brady Dale)

• Gabriel Winer of NYU-Poly described “The Satellite,” a real-time portrait of the Earth, continuously updated from satellite data. Viewers will be able watch hurricanes as they form and see the aurora borealis from space. Despite all of our advanced computing, though, Winer said, “It’s hard to model clouds.”

While no longer based in Brooklyn, Seen.co was born here. Check out its roundup page, collecting the best tweets from the event. Mor Naaman, a cofounder at Seen and one of the professors helping to put together the Cornell Technion on Roosevelt Island told a story of going to Stanford and often being told “this is the place and the time is now.” Naaman said that may have been true, but New York has become the place and it’s time is now. Word.