Project

OBSERVATÓR!O2016 monitors and presents visualizations of large volumes of data about the Olympic Games collected mainly from Twitter. The project aims to highlight the multiplicity of perspectives, controversies and themes related to the sporting event and enhance cognition of the debate through structured and interactive visualizations.

Data collection and IT framework

This section addresses the mechanisms that made it possible to collect, analyze and visualize data. As well as the information technology framework that supports the project.

Deployment

We conceive the project as an experimental work in which the process of creation, development and learning is so important as the final result. That's why OBSERVATÓR!O2016 was launched a couple of months before the Opening Ceremony. Our goal was to iterate the project several times so we could learn from the process and refine OBSERVATÓR!O2016's concept and techniques.

Web portal beta version

Launched on March 2016, this version focused on bringing together tweets and news exclusively from the Olympics official source. The temporal apprehension of the experiments designed at this stage was essentially static, with snapshots that captured especific moments of the Pre Olympics.

Web portal version 1.0

It combines official data with data streams shared by groups of actors with different interests and perspectives, such as ordinary user accounts, critical spokespeople and both mainstream and alternative media. The broader and more heterogeneous approach at this stage was followed by experiments that include a temporal dimension.

Web portal version 2.0

Interesting aspects of the Olympics that would be in evidence during the competitions are considered, with focus on sporting disciplines, nations and individual athletes. More sophisticated visualizations - capable of communicating layered meanings - are explored. At this stage the new experiences incorporate an almost real-time fruition of the data.

Web portal version 3.0

During the Games, our work focuses on three main directions: following the topics that were generating more buzz to feed our blog with stories; identifing athletes with better performance to create a new visualization; implementing temporal handlers in visualisations that have not yet presented this feature.

Digital memory

After the Olympics, the project will keep expanding. OBSERVATÓR!O2016 portal will be a digital memory of Rio-2016. Since the collected data are stored in their entirety, future analysis and visualization are possible.

Seminars and publications

OBSERVATÓR!O2016 had the opportunity to be presented in a few seminars, exhibitions and publications. In this session, you can access the results of our research.

Clipping

This session gathers links to articles, commentaries and interviews that were published about OBSERVATÓR!O2016.