AMY E MARTIN // Blog

Synesketch is a Java library that translates text into visual representations of emotion. To implement this, I had to move from the Processing development environment to Eclipse. I've heard it's easy to transition, but apparently I've only heard LIES!

What the hell is "Ant" and why does it keep popping up when I try to run something? Why did it take 15 minutes to figure out how to turn on line numbers? What's a package and why is Eclipse hollering at me for using the default? What the hell is try and why do I keep having to use it to catch exceptions? Processing is fairly easy for designers with no programming background at all. Eclipse is probably easier to work in if you're a programmer but most designers I know will look at this program and its infinite buttons and unfamiliar words, go "wah" and move on.

That being said, I really, really, really wanted to play with this library so I managed to get it working, sort of. It broke when I tried to add text fields since I'm not sure how/where fonts need to be stored.

Above are the patterns for the six basic emotions (originally defined by Paul Ekman) included in the Synesketch package. I spent some time this morning inputting text to test the patterns to make sure they worked. Then I decided to "analyze" the home pages of a couple of news sites. I use analyze in quotes because I have no idea what kinds of algorithms are used and even if I did know I probably would not understand. That being said, look what came up with the below news sites!

Fox is angry as hell. Msnbc is a little bit scared, a little bit disgusted and a little bit saaaaad. It would be fantastic fun to create some kind of standalone or web app using this library. I'd like to run something that analyzed some set of websites every day and collected that data over time. Although now that I write that, it'd be possible to hook the library through the NYTimes api so we wouldn't have to wait to accumulate that data. Oh, internet, how much joy you bring.

Labels: data visualization, processing, programming