AMY E MARTIN // Blog

So I've finally finished my new website. You're looking at it. It compiles my old print portfolio with a more formal presentation of my interactive work along with my resume. Hooray! Please send me a note if you find something broken.

Monday, March 23, 2009 // 2 Comments

More data visualizations. These all use Processing. The data I eventually was able to scrape includes info from IMDB and the NYTimes API. The first one pulls total instances of the wars as keywords in NYTimes articles from 1981-2008 (they don't have anything indexed before 1981 at the moment), then it spits it out into a long bar chart. The large orange spike is the beginning of the Gulf War. The subsequent yellow/orange spikes are 9/11 and the brownish color spike is the start of the Iraq War. I have no idea what the strange WWII peak around 10/95 is.

This visualization uses both the NYTimes Articles API and the scraping from IMDB. It is a comparison between word counts in the NYTimes abstracts where WWII is a keyword and the descriptions on IMDB of WWII movies. I haven't actually looked at this that much as I just wrote it today (this stuff is all due tomorrow) but the first thing I notice is that in "reality" (the NYTimes articles) Japan features much larger than Germany whereas in the movie descriptions, Germany shows up more often.

These last two visualizations are of the same data set. The most popular movies about wars (according to IMDB) from 1900-2008.

Labels: data visualization, interactive, processing, programming, school work

Thursday, March 12, 2009 // 0 Comments

So for one of my interactive studios (all my posts start off this way, I should think of something different to say, perhaps involving time vampires) we're doing small programs using sound and choice. Our first two projects were to make a soundboard out of a comic and make an instrument. I predictably pulled something from TekkonKinkreet and added some Buddhist chanting. Then I made some virtual bongos. Painfully simple projects as my brain needed a bit of a Processing break. We have four more projects using sound and choice to create for next Thursday and I've started slowly on a couple with ideas for more in the works.

One is an applet that takes words and plays sounds with them. I'm not entirely sure how I want this to work, or, more correctly, I know exactly what I want this to do, I just don't entirely know how to make it work so that it does what I want it to do. I've spent most of the day poking around with code (making sure a sample plays once instead of starting and restarting over and over again, attempting to split apart tracks so that I can make the applet color-sensitive, etc) and I accidentally ended up with a simple Processing music visualizer. It looks something like this:

I can't really use this for class because it doesn't involve any choice (and I think it'd be kind of lame to slap a text field on here and say "you can change the music" and have *that* be the choice aspect) but I think it's a lovely accident. Much thanks to my awesome classmate Bryan Bindloss, who provided the fantastic samples I've been playing with all day.

Labels: interactive, processing, programming, school work

Sunday, March 1, 2009 // 1 Comments

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