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Record W4413571919 · doi:10.1177/26349825251360658

Smart city photo booths: Playful data

2025· article· en· W4413571919 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueEnvironment and Planning F · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicSmart Cities and Technologies
Canadian institutionsToronto Metropolitan University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsVisual artsArtComputer scienceWorld Wide WebArchitectural engineeringEngineering

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This paper shares one of the critical moments in an interdisciplinary collaboration between an urban geographer/planner and a visual artist in which we explore different ways of seeing, knowing, mapping, and imagining. Our work develops integrated and participatory spaces in which to generate stronger and more nuanced geographical and artistic insights into people’s embodied experiences and encounters with/of urban space. This essay shares the example of a playful data intervention conducted by students prompted to engage in the complexities and possibilities of digital landscapes. It looks at urban surveillance as a technological ecosystem, thinking particularly about traffic cameras, weather cameras, and other visual monitoring systems—digital infrastructures premised on gathering “data.” It also thinks about poetic and experiential alternatives to this way of conceptualizing space. The camera is probably the first step toward integrated urban technological living—from which we can extrapolate and research what other kinds of things are being implemented and how that might fit with the (un)availability of user experience. In response, we proposed a participatory project engaging the question of urban citizenship in which participants find themselves inside of this visual ecosystem and share pictures of themselves taken from publicly available surveillance cameras. We call it “smart city photo booths” and our hope is that it helps us rethink the relationship between data and lived experiences within digitally mediated society. It gets into the concept of “smart” data. We think about smartness as a form of research/espionage that perhaps requires citizen participation and collective human (counter) intelligence to the data-imperatives emerging in the discourses around smart cities.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.628
Threshold uncertainty score0.342

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.023
GPT teacher head0.214
Teacher spread0.191 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it