NMC Symposium on Mashups

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Mashups

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A mashup is a combination of data or content from more than one source, often brought together in ways that reveal non-intuitive insights. Mashups can be creative products—indeed, the term “mashup” originates from the music industry—such as assorted film and music clips assembled into parodies of well-known productions, but the term is also being applied to juxtapositions of pure data, which for lack of a better term, we will distinguish here as data mashups. In a research or learning context, data mashups are powerful tools for navigating and visualizing datasets; understanding connections between different dimensions such as time, distance, and location; and bringing together data from different sources to reveal new relationships.

The premise we hope to advance here, and in the upcoming Symposium, is that mashups of all kinds are going to be both increasingly important and increasingly easy to create. They will provide a way for students to participate in research even as undergraduates; and they will lead to new insights, as we have already seen with mashups overlaying longitudinal economic, health, and family datasets with maps and geolocation.

The potential of mashups for education lies in the very serendipity they foster. Often patterns are not obvious until an overlay of additional data reveals those relationships. The field has it roots in data mining, which allows large amounts of data to be processed in a manageable way. Building on this foundation of solid work, new web-based tools for manipulating data are increasingly easy to use, widely available, and many are even free.