Virtual Architectures

Errant thought - An LLM is a surprisingly successful dowsing rod which navigates language by pointing to the next token. The rod is a model which points in a vector determined by the combined influence of it's input, it's weights, it's biases and activations. Spooky!

Is AI for the birds? The beauty of backyard birdsong data Birdsong is all around us, but is there a deeper meaning? Can computer analysis help us decipher these hidden patterns in our own backyar...

'Is AI for the birds? The beauty of backyard birdsong data' by Logan Williams at #WHY2025 via @ccc.de: media.ccc.de/v/why2025-24...

Paper abstract for 'Urban digital twins: Digital twins for participatory steering' by Oliver Dawkins and Rob Kitchin.

New paper - 'Urban digital twins: Digital twins for participatory steering' with @robkitchin.bsky.social: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... The paper appears in the latest special issue of New Media & Society on 'Digital Twinning': journals.sagepub.com/toc/nmsa/27/8

Data Stories game ideation

Tiny House board game

Testing game mechanics

Data Stories Commodity Narratives research question and ideation

New from Data Stories - Carla and I recently visited Oxford Brookes to participate in the Tiny House Games workshop with Mel Nowiki and our collaborators Ella Harris and Hannah Mumby. Check out the post and video for more on #ResearchCreation with games: datastories.maynoothuniversity.ie?page_id=33

YouTube video by Benn Jordan I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird

How to save a PNG to a bird! 😂 Great video from Benn Jordan youtu.be/hCQCP-5g5bo

YouTube video by Machine Learning Street Talk Intelligence = Doing More with Less (David Krakauer)

This is a great, irreverent interview with David Krakauer on the implications of complexity science for the understanding of emergence in LLMs. Feels spot on! youtu.be/jXa8dHzgV8U

YouTube video by Eli Fieldsteel SuperCollider Live Coded Improvisation - 15 March 2025

I'm loving this live coded performance by Eli Fieldsteel in #SuperCollider I really must find some time to give it a try! youtu.be/09o9IUanLng

Have LLMs Finally Mastered Geolocation? - bellingcat We tasked LLMs from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Mistral and xAI to geolocate our unpublished holiday snaps. Here's how they did.

Fascinating piece from @bellingcat.com testing LLMs for Geolocation. I was particularly struck by the negative impact of 'reasoning' and 'thinking' functions which often feel like 'self-checking', or sometimes even 'self-defeating', functions: www.bellingcat.com/resources/ho...

The Journal Investigates: Where are all the data centres and why should you care?

investigates.thejournal.ie/data-centres

Juliette Davret presenting the Data Stories paper 'Data mobilities: rethinking the movement and circulation of digital data'.

New from Data Stories: Read about the recent paper presentation of 'Data mobilities: rethinking the movement and circulation of digital data' by @juliettedavret.bsky.social on behalf of our team at SAGEO in France: datastories.maynoothuniversity.ie?p=734

Verso books sale haul including books by Wark, Laclau, Doctorow and Routhier.

Got a bit excited in the recent @versobooks.bsky.social sale. 📚Sorry, not sorry. Still prefer reading physical copies.

Latest from Data Stories: Read about Danielle and Sam's recent presentations on ‘Creative Methodologies’ with artists and ‘Critical Geographies of Housing’ on eviction data for CIG2025 at Queens University, Belfast: datastories.maynoothuniversity.ie?p=727

Jean Tinguely Made Art That Moves—Literally. Here’s Why He Still Matters Jean Tinguely was born on May 22, 1925. To celebrate his centenary, here are four things to know about the celebrated Swiss artist.

Four things to know about the art of Jean Tinquely: news.artnet.com/art-world/wh...

Read our latest blog update by Sam Mutter about the recent Community Action Archives Event in Dublin, hosted by Tom O’Dea with the Liberties Community Development Project and CATU: datastories.maynoothuniversity.ie?p=723

Visualisation of 3DTiles for Dublin running with Cesium in the open-source Godot game engine.

I took a first look at the Cesium 3DTiles plugin by Battle Road Digital for the open-source Godot Engine today. I haven't tested Godot in a while but this project was a great reason to pick it up again. The plugin was really easy to setup. Further details here: cesium.com/blog/2025/05...

Sign post to Luxembourg

Read about researcher @juliettedavret.bsky.social's recent meetings with Eurostat and ESPON to explore links between housing Data Stories in Ireland and the rest of Europe: datastories.maynoothuniversity.ie?p=707

A really interesting oral history of the relationship of #NLP and #LLMs, part of a very strong series that Quanta magazine is running on the state of AI...

Just two days left for the deadline on 30th April to apply for Dani and Sam's CFP on 'Data Voids' this November in Lisbon, Portugal. See below for details 👇

Data visualisation and interaction for cities and the built environment, Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 6:30 PM | Meetup We are excited to announce the second event of Dublin Dataviz! After an amazing opening night, we are back on the 30th of April for another fantastic speaker (and possibly

I'll be talking at the Dublin Dataviz meetup next week about a range of projects from digital twins, urban data dashboards and real-time urban sensing to web scraping, AI and large LLMs for structured data extraction. Hopefully something for everyone! www.meetup.com/dublin-datav...

Data Stories and friends at a print making workshop in Detroit at AAG 2025.

Read about the Data Stories team's recent visit to Detroit for #AAG2025 - 'AAG Conference Recap: Sessions, Walking Tour, and Printmaking Workshop': datastories.maynoothuniversity.ie?p=694

CATU Eviction Nation Report Launch

CATU Eviction Nation report launched! Read about the launch, report and involvement of the Data Stories team here: datastories.maynoothuniversity.ie?p=674

Flier for the Data Voids call for papers - Special Session at 4th Digital Geographies Conference, 3-4 November 2025, Lisbon

Data Voids Call for Papers - Special Session at 4th Digital Geographies Conference, 3-4 November 2025, Lisbon The deadline for abstracts is April 30. Please read the Data Stories project blog for further details: datastories.maynoothuniversity.ie?p=670

YouTube video by ahujasid Blender MCP Demo: Using a reference image

The Blender MCP demo by ahujasid using Claude is pretty impressive: youtu.be/FDRb03XPiRo

YouTube video by Two Minute Papers Finally, DeepMind Made An IQ Test For AIs! 🤖

Good video on physics in generative video...although the findings really ought not to be surprising: youtu.be/Y5GYqeCCu5Y

YouTube video by NVIDIA Developer High-Fidelity 3D Mesh Generation at Scale with Meshtron | NVIDIA Research

I'm genuinely quite excited by NVIDIA's #Meshtron for pointcloud reconstruction: youtu.be/akj3bSYCBTk

#VibeCoding - The art of technical debt.

Nice workflow for starting new code projects with AI. Coding with #Aider seems really promising. Curious to see how well it works with local models.

Poster for the two-day workshop 'The use of research creation and arts-based methods in studying housing, planning and the built environment' (9–10 September 2025).

CFP - 'The use of research creation and arts-based methods in studying housing, planning and the built environment' (9–10 September 2025). Applications for one of our 13 workshop bursaries are due by the 14th of March. Refer to our blog for further details: datastories.maynoothuniversity.ie?p=650

The book cover of 'Geodesign, Urban Digital Twins, and Futures' (Creton & Hartley, 2025).

Page showing the case study 'Data City Dublin' by the Data Stories Project.

I'm excited to have received a copy of 'Geodesign, Urban Digital Twins, and Futures' by @paulcureton.bsky.social and Elliot Hartley in the post today. It examines #Geodesign, #UrbanDigitalTwins, #Gaming, #ParticipatoryPlanning, and features our own project 'Data City Dublin' as a case study.

Call for papers for Data Stories forthcoming two day workshop 'The use of research creation and arts-based methods in studying housing, planning and the built environment' (9–10 September 2025).

Data Stories have a new #CFP offering a total of 13 bursaries for our forthcoming two day workshop 'The use of research creation and arts-based methods in studying housing, planning and the built environment' (9–10 September 2025): datastories.maynoothuniversity.ie?p=650