amy martin // blog

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2010-05-12T00:41:00.000-07:00

This post shall also be known as my late Week Review for April 6, 2010.

I must have have written my previous post at some odd hour of the night because I barely remember deciding to do a week review. I also can't imagine why I would decide to do such a thing when I have a month left of graduate school, a billion thesis-related knots to tie and as I think people say on reality television shows "it's crunch time."

Still, I said I'd do it and if I remember to keep doing it, I will. We had a momentous faculty review at the end of last week. I think it went well and I got a lot of helpful and interesting feedback from the faculty and my classmates. After we got through all the presentations, my classmates and I celebrated afterwards and I realized once again how much I am going to miss them. Ne'er has a better group of humans existed. That said, most of the week was spent working on my presentation until ungodly hours of the night, not sleeping and not spending more than a few hours at home every day. So I don't know that I came across anything terribly interesting.

I posted this on my thesis blog, but I'll post it here as well. My thesis talk is on Thursday, May 6 at 2:30pm. It's a hard time to get to for those who work, but if you have the time, I'll be going over more of my thesis work in depth and there are other talks before and after mine as well as an exhibition of all our work in the studio. Here is the lovely postcard that I sent out last week (or maybe the week before, I forget). So that is pretty much it until next week! This is a sadly boring post, but I hope to have a final piece for my thesis done soon so I'll talk about that at some point as well.

Week Review // March 28, 2010

2010-03-29T02:14:00.000-07:00

So I've seen a few blogs that post a weekly update of sorts. I think I'll join in for a while just because I have tiny things on my mind that I'd like to share but have no particular reason to share them and 140 characters just isn't enough.

Idea: In the future water is so scarce that we have bio-engineered our sweat to act as a kind of soap. To get clean we have to partake in serious, strenuous physical exercise. I heard a few weeks ago that humans evolved for endurance running (barefoot, of course) and that we'd actually just chase our prey for hours until they got tired. I don't know where I heard this and it's possible that I completely made it up, but for whatever reason, the sweat as soap idea made me think of our alleged past and a funny circle that is probably completed in a sci-fi short story somewhere.

Thought: Is it an American thing to see an idea whose fame is based on its novelty, and get completely pissed off because you've seen that idea before and the anger-inducing instance of that idea does not credit the people who executed it first? Nevermind that I have no idea if the second idea executioners had any knowledge of the first idea executioners. I still get miffed. It's an emotional reaction that I find kind of baffling because I can't think of any ideas I've had that are unique. I should not be surprised that people have the same ideas... even the incredibly creative ones. And yet, I still groan when I see a clever idea twice. Makes me wonder if the groaning is somehow tied to a socially-taught, underlying morality-based concept of intellectual property. I'm sure there's a phD candidate I could talk to about this.

Other than those two stray thoughts and, say, really wanting to visit this dream come true trampoline gym, I've been working fairly constantly on my thesis work. I feel I've only recently gotten to a place I am really enjoying and I hope I can finish up the last few ideas I'm having before I have to stop and document the whole thing.

I posted the video below to my thesis website. There's more description of it there and if you click to Vimeo. I like it but I really need to add a time slider and animate the code such that we can see the city building itself up over the course of the week. Unfortunately, I've spent the last two days hacking through someone else's code to extract data from it for my last piece (or second-to-last if I can finish it fast enough). If only I had more time.

Re: Fwd: Email

2010-03-24T14:45:00.001-07:00

So I'm working on a website for my thesis project: Re: Fwd: Email. Most thesis-related posts will happen there from now on. Hooray!

An interlude.

2010-03-12T01:31:00.000-08:00

As I am approaching the end of my MFA odyssey my schedule is something like: roll out of bed. work. work. work. work. maybe eat, most likely not. work. work. work. stress out. cry. work. question belief system. work. work. work. collapse. So when Processing creates something quite lovely out of a misplaced for loop, I can't help but go "awww, math is beautiful."

Processing 1.1 just released too. I heart Processing.

Thesis Update

2010-02-19T23:25:00.000-08:00

I've posted some of my ongoing thesis pieces Bloom and inbox on my all things exciting thesis blog. I've also included some movies there so you can see things in action. I tend to bite off more than I can chew and end up chewing more or less constantly for days in order to get things working satisfactorily. I'm pretty happy with Bloom, a Processing piece, because I essentially wrote a tiny email display application nearly from scratch (with the guidance and encouragement of my advisor Tom and my school advisors.) While I don't see myself as an actual programmer working on software development, I am pretty happy with how far things have come since this time last year. Goooo full time devotion to learning new things!

Last semester's work and TEI

2010-01-31T12:04:00.000-08:00

I am so slammed with thesis and freelance projects (mostly thesis though) that I have not been able to post nearly as much work as I would like from last semester, much less anything I've been doing in the past month, nor my thoughts about TEI last week.

I have a bunch of sketches inside of my head that depict where a designer fits in in the seemingly polarized worlds of art and science. This is primarily what I was thinking about the entire time I was in Cambridge. But for now, the studios at TEI were quite fun (I will post more later on the one I took about making displays). And if my new cat (!) would stop running around and crashing into her water bowl, I could finish this interim blog entry.

Crowley Martin, R.I.P.

2009-12-20T12:36:00.001-08:00

Last November my 11 year old cat, Crowley, passed away due to renal failure. He was a wonderful cat. Almost immediately, I started making a book for him and I got it back from the printers a few weeks ago. As requested by my boyfriend, I am posting it here.

Who would care if you disappeared?

2009-12-16T11:10:00.000-08:00

For most of the morning, I've been reading about Phil Agre; partially because a potentially tragic mystery (shamefully) raises my rubbernecking senses, but also because some of his publications are tangentially relevant to my thesis. They are excellent reads.

What has me personally invested in this Agre narrative* is the fact that he's been missing for over a year and his family just filed a missing persons report in October; he used to have a mailing list of 5,000 subscribers and nobody noticed he was gone; he abandoned his job and apartment sometime last year and still nobody realized he was not there anymore. I would say I don't know how someone so seemingly connected could phase out so easily. But that's not true, I totally know. I'm sure it's quite easy.

I originally wanted to do my thesis project on the replace-ability of people. That is, people increasingly have the ability to exist independently. This diminishes the functional need for community and connection. It becomes easier to move in and out of communities and interpersonal relationships without making any kind of commitment because those communities and relationships can simply be replaced with new communities and new relationships. That entire system tends to devalues human life. This vague phenomenon is still somewhat of an obsession for me.

So when I read about Agre, I think that whatever role he must've played in peoples' lives‚Äìas distant as it may have been‚Äìwas easily replaceable with another person. His disappearance went unnoticed for quite some time. In my mind, he planned it that way. It seems like a large amount of work to stay in touch with people but it also seems like a large amount of work to keep people away.

It is strange to me that not too too long ago, you could move across the world and your family would never expect to hear from you again. There are few places one can go now and achieve that level of silence. If that is what Agre was seeking, I hope he found it. For me, for now, I am definitely using his papers in my thesis project. Thanks Phil!

*I would just say Agre but I don't know this person and have only been vaguely aware of his existence until the announcement of his disappearance, a funny thing in itself.

Radio Time Line

2009-12-08T15:40:00.000-08:00

Our Futurism class is broken into three sections: materiality, context and time. For materiality I made a spinning cat, context was the vibrating gloves and time I ended up making a kind of memory orrery. My first thought, though, was to make a radio sound lapse file/time line thing. I started by collecting recordings of radio waves from space, the recording from that Frenchman's phonautograph, the fascinating spit and spin of Edison's phonograph recordings and recordings of radio shows from the early part of last century.

Then I spent a ridiculous amount of time splicing together Billboard's top song of the year from 1958 to 2008. I only used this obliquely in the final project (i.e., not really at all) so I'm posting it here in all its copyright offending glory. It's not an amazing mix, the quality of the recordings is pretty crappy and I'm no dj but somehow I think it's funny. Also, billboard has abominable taste in music.

Top Song of the Year 1958-2008

Week of No Email

2009-12-06T13:16:00.001-08:00

So for my thesis project--which I've narrowed down to a design exploration of future physical forms of email--I've begun an empathy experiment of sorts. To better understand why people are so compelled to check email constantly, I've decided NOT to check my email at all for a week. I'm writing about it on my thesis blog (which I need to rename), but as it's wrapping up, I figured I'd mention it here.

General thought: not checking email made me deeply anxious. I couldn't take it so I caved for a moment and scanned my inbox for work-related items. I found two requests for the same files (oops) so I uploaded those and sent a message to my employers via IM. I also had to send a file to myself via email because the laser cutter studios would not allow use of a flash drive to transfer a file.

On the other hand, the lack of email--or more aptly put, the lack of twitching my eyes and fingers to look for new email every 5-15 minutes--has noticeably created space inside my cranium. At first it felt a little empty and isolated, but now, despite my growing anxiety, that space feels nice. Quiet.

My First Haptic Glove, Part II

2009-10-26T16:52:00.001-07:00

So the second part of my vibrator glove (which I am told sounds somewhat scandalous) is a separate controller glove. It is wired with flex sensors (as opposed to vibration motors) and so when you bend one finger on the brown gloves, it turns on the vibrator motor of the matching finger in the teal glove.

Ideally, two people far away from each other in distance, could communicate physical awareness through the flex sensor and receive that awareness through the vibration glove (so each person would have one of each). I've also got other ideas for it, though. Or larger ideas. I have a handful of trashed guitars that I'd like to "play" for people with the gloves. Because the flex sensor glove is on the left hand, I could, theoretically anyway, press chords on the fretboard and then have that transfer directly to the strumming of the strings via the vibration motors. That isn't one to one (bar chords for example) so I was thinking it might be fun to make or procure a simpler stringed instrument where one person dictates the strings to be "strummed" and the other person is a passive strummer.

I also hooked up the vibration motor glove to a couple of quick Processing sketches that assigned different combinations of vibration to different letters such that typing words into the program vibrated different patterns on the glove. I did the same thing with music but the patterns are determined by a FFT of the sound waves (something that comes with the Sonia library, my math fu is like a bird that can multiply, it's all instinctual).

So! Putting that together was pretty easy. I'm going to probably post photos of the circuits themselves (since I am likely to forget how to hook them up) and the Processing code (which is super janky) for getting the gloves to talk to each other. I didn't do it in the Arduino IDE because it doesn't run on my computer. I am a fearless (shameless?) installer of software so I'm assuming there's some conflict somewhere but I haven't isolated the issue yet.

Relatedly (that's not a word!) I ordered some light sensors, another nano and some other random stuff from Sparkfun last week and I signed up for the Design, Music and Technology class as my elective next semester. Perhaps we'll see a resurrection of Pinky Le Fur, the furry pressure sensitive keyboard sampler/visualizer or something.

My First Haptic Glove, Part I

2009-10-23T11:42:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in the last couple of days I realized that soldering is more than just making tiny little terrifying Terminators and that motors and sensors and stuff are, like, easy to put together. (I say this now because I haven't shocked myself or fried any circuits yet but I reserve the right to future correction.)

Last semester, we were introduced to Arduino (a basic microcontroller) but I hadn't done anything beyond the tutorials until this week. I think that's in part because I've been wrestling with other technological demons (hi, Processing!) and also because I required some level of proficiency with those demons (uh, Processing) before I felt confident enough to try something else.

But... it's really easy! My fingers hurt and soldering is endlessly boring and unergonomic but making a little glove with vibration motors at the fingertips was surprisingly simple (to my non-engineering brain). It is, admittedly, terribly janky. I have probably wired things in an awful way and I'm sure there's something bad about using cheap poly-cotton blend gloves from Walgreens (I'll let you know when I shock myself or burn the tips of my fingers). For now, though, fun!

This is one glove. Thanks to the brains of my classmates and lots of fiddling, the motors are controlled individually and I have a basic program that causes a finger to vibrate based on mouse position. That is a totally breeze to change to something else, though and that will happen once the second glove is done and I figure out exactly what these things will be demonstrating.

UIST in Victoria

2009-10-07T19:15:00.000-07:00

Through the grace of my adviser, Wendy Ju along with the hard work of my awesome classmates (Matthew Canton, Gustavo Fricke, Jason Mickelson and Kristin Neidlinger), I got to go to UIST ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Victoria, B.C. over the weekend. I left early to avoid missing class but ended up getting sick and so missed class anyway.

Closeups of our model

I ended up being the only art school student presenting a project with Microsoft's pressure sensitive keyboard. That was interesting to say the least. Sometimes people didn't quite understand what we were trying to do but everyone was super friendly and some folks were an absolute joy to talk to. Here is the pitch in its more or less final incarnation.

This is what the setup looked like although I moved the poster and after a while closed the laptop so people would focus more on the model.

"This is Fovea Digitalis, a tool to help laptop musicians maintain connection with their audience. Typically during a live laptop show, you'll see the performer standing, hunched over a laptop, sometimes looking and up and seeing the crowd but then having to go back down into the software. They can't even maintain basic eye contact with their audience because they have to break that connection every few seconds or so to keep track of what's going on with the music. What we've done is essentially turn the keyboard into an instrument, allowing the laptop musician to step away from the laptop and remain integrated into the performance. You can wear it with a strap or integrate it into a suit and the keyboard becomes part of the performance. Samples are triggered under this pink square and then the samples are modulated just by rubbing the keyboard. The music is also tied to the visuals so the audience not only sees what the performer is doing directly but is also surrounded by it as well."

At that point I'd usually show the model we created as context. As the night went on, I also added bits about what the keyboard could be in the future. Samples were limited to just the num pad by our time and my meager programming skills but samples might be mapped to the entire keyboard such that a light tap turns on the sample, a harder tap increases the amplitude and the hardest tap might run it through a filter or keep it on a loop. The precision required to both program and play the keyboard matches it much more closely to a traditional musical instrument which would allow the musician to play for the audience without breaking the persona of performance.

Closeup of the keyboard skin.

All in all, I think it was a good experience and the conference was fun. Also, meeting people behind a lot of the research I'm collecting for my thesis was invaluable. Now I just have to connect names with faces and send out emails saying "hey, remember me? I was standing around the 3d club model, holding a furry keyboard like a keytar?"

Design School Leads to Odd Things

2009-09-28T23:29:00.000-07:00

In class lately, we've been analyzing this and diagramming that, none of it "real" per se. Lest I fall behind, here is a slew of my recent projects.

This first one is for a class called Mythology and Meaning. We were tasked with watching a film and breaking it down for its mythic qualities. I got Man on Wire and rather than explain everything, I'm linking to my documents about it. We also made infographics and images to represent the myths we found most prominent in the stories. Look! It's blue!

For my presearch class we have done a few things. One is a sample abstract for a conference but I feel funny posting that assignment since, although it explains and refines my thesis topic, it also presumes I'm going to do something amazing and worthwhile with my thesis topic. I'm not convinced of that yet (though I imagine it will be a good experience for me) so I'm not posting it. But our last assignment involved taking an object that related to our thesis topic, breaking it down and redesigning it. My object was Google Reader and my redesign was fairly shallow. I like the photos of the puppies, however, and the breakdown of its functions and the new opportunity space created by aggregating the aggregates is interesting, if a little redundant. I think, perhaps, the next step in organization of information is a sideways or diagonal step instead of a straight forward step.

Here's the pdf of that presentation, though. Puppies! They're in there.

The last project I've been working on is for a class called Futurism. It's fun. I am projecting an image of a cat onto a cardboard cut out of a cat which spins on a lazy Susan. I also took goofy pictures of myself depicting six basic emotions and have been talking with people doing some really interesting work in the texture of emotion and a kind of digital synesthesia (I mentioned it before - Synesketch).

I don't know how well I explain it in the presentation papers but essentially my idea is a textural manifestation of emotion as a stepping stone into volumetric display. So I called it Volumetric Tactile Display but who knows what that means anyway. Essentially I wanted to make invisible things physical by giving them a physical feeling. I kept pushing and pushing though and of course I ended up with shared emotional experiences (in a NON creepy way). Future thoughts always lead to a certain level of creepiness. I wonder if we are permanently hovering over the edge of the uncanny valley.

I should also say that I am exhausted and haven't had much sleep lately hence the lack of posts and the rather stochastic (can I even say that?) tone of this post. I'm home now and I'm so going to eat an ice cream sandwich and watch Star Trek. It's on.

Nerd Balloon Party

2009-09-17T02:55:00.000-07:00

It's fairly quiet at 3am on a Wednesday night/Thursday morning. The refrigerator makes strange sounds but there's no downstairs-neighbor-bird or question cat (the one whose meows end in question marks) yakking about their days. Although I generally post most of my work to the CCA grad design site, I would rather keep a record of it on my own sites and so here's a big ass post of some of the other strange stuff I've been doing.

To finish up on the previous post about a physical extrusion of a digital existence, after creating the flow of IM (in my head anyway), I wrote out the functions of IM. Then I listed analog analogues (der) with the same primary functionality (communication and record) and THEN I listed why those things were different. I was basically trying to figure out what was unique to IM other than its digital nature. I then started thinking about a tangible system that would replicate IM's uniqueness. Like, whee.

I don't have anything visual to show for those parts. Or I do, but it's ugly. So, instead, enjoy this simplistic representation of networks, systems and applications. (Network is the lines, systems are the circles and applications are the boxes).

Next is a quick presentation on digital and physical convergence in gaming trends, minus my spastic and awkward commentary. I am no gaming expert and it isn't a field I know intimately but I still like to blow sh*t up (or eat tacos as in Time Donkey).

The last thing I'm going to talk about before my brain coagulates is a mind mapping exercise in which I express extreme laziness. In class we created several sets of words and we were supposed to combine those to generate new ideas for things. I took the words and phrases, wrote a program to randomize them and spit them back out at me and then, like, ran it. Here is a small snippet of illegible results.

So I ended up with shit like "platform skin" and "worm hole tech is novelty in food service." It was quite entertaining and I think my brain wants to concept some kind of collective skin device. I don't know what that means really but that's where I'm going, except for the fact that the phrase sounds like collective soul... entirely unacceptable. Maybe it's collective synesthesia. Maybe I really need to sleep.

Weird Things I'm Doing

2009-09-09T00:20:00.000-07:00

Actually the assignment was weird but what I came up with was not. I wish the pieces were weirder. I want to work the weird, man. Anyway, the assignment was to analyze some kind of thing that exists digitally and extrude it into physical space. Now that I look back on the work it seems a form study of a digital thing. Also now that I don't have to do it anymore, my mind is semi-filled with abstract forms that have nothing to do with the functionality of the thing that I chose and mostly to do with its structure. Unfortunately when I was doing the assignment I stuck with functional ideas. So here it is:

The digital thing that I chose to analyze was instant messaging (no particular carrier). I wrote down the process by which one person creates an instant message and sends it to another person who reads it. The flip process would be the response. I then drew visual representations of each of the steps (thoughts - units (as I have always physically felt my thoughts as blocks of stuff but that metaphor probably only works for me), words - sentence diagram, fingers - neurons, keyboard - keys, computer - computer chip, modem - a digital signal via an analog wave (not an exact representation but whatevs, I'm sleepy), ISP - network, IM - globs of information traded from one side to another then back through ISP, modem, computer, screen now instead of keyboard, eyes - cones and rods, words and thoughts.

I hoped by going through the process of both verbally and visually defining the thing that I'd have a better understanding of it. I don't know if that's true or not but it was a fun exercise. There are about 7 more pdfs of this assignment but I'll have to wait until later to document them. Too much work left and too sleepy.

Actually using Processing to, like, sketch?

2009-09-04T09:54:00.000-07:00

I don't know when this happened but it is now much easier and faster for me to create certain kinds of complex illustrations with Processing than with Illustrator. Weird.

So a network in the context of the assignment I'm working on (go school!) is basically just interconnected units. This needn't have any hierarchy but for whatever reason I chose hierarchy (and now that I type that, I'm going to have to do a non-hierarchical sketch. I kinda can't stand unexplored rocks). So, right now a subunit connects to a main unit which then connects to another main unit which can connect back down to a subunit. I sketched this in my sketchbook, then immediately went to Illustrator and started putting together the sketch.

To be fair, I am quite solid with Illustrator but I don't know the nuances of it the way I know Photoshop and Indesign. There may be a macro-ish function that would allow me to use Illustrator to generate a random number of random beziers which emanate from a single point and then to interconnect each single point with x number of other sets of bezier "flowers." I don't know how to do this, however, and so I would've done the entire sketch by hand and it would've taken me a significantly longer amount of time than it took me to write a Processing program that did the same thing. (That, I wrote in 30 minutes).

And when sketching other parts of the assignment, I can take the same Processing sketch, add two lines of code and have a new sketch. Working with Eclipse lately has definitely shown me how specific (and simple) Processing is in comparison. I am certainly no expert and probably never will be and it's taken 9 months of near daily stammering and cursing to even be vaguely proficient but compare that to the years of study it takes to become a good programmer and I feel like I've found a very pleasant middle ground.

Synesketch and Eclipse

2009-09-02T12:59:00.000-07:00

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.

New Website. Whee.

2009-08-28T16:15:00.000-07:00

Can't believe I said "summer sandwich"? Me neither. The summer is officially over (according to me anyway) and it's time to start settling into thesis thoughts. But before I do that, I made a new website. See? It is probably half broken but will become less broken over the next week or so. I took a lot of my previous work down because it's just getting too old to show. I added a new blog for my thesis and updated my interactive work with some of the stuff I did at Stamen over the summer.

(I made another emergency trip to Seattle... check out all those protuberances of planet Earth!)

I've also been playing a tad with Processing.js, a Javascript port of Processing. It took all of two seconds to make one of my seizure-inducing sketches from first semester (only works in a super current browser). And I also did some basic Wikipedia sketches in Processing.js.

Intermission, Part II

2009-08-04T12:14:00.001-07:00

The meat of my summer sandwich is my internship‚Äìwhere I'm doing fun things but I can't really discuss it much at the moment‚Äìalong with the various condiments: freelance work, volunteer work and at least one personal project. Plus, while my apartment has been set up for months, I am still finding places to put plants‚ÄìSouth facing windows and all. Lately I've had a thing for succulents but I probably have more than enough plants to take care of going into the winter months.

I am also working on a new website that I hope to launch before school starts and I hope to have something to post from the personal project that I got materials for but haven't had any time to dig into, despite how easy it would be to get something ready if I only had an extra day or two. Sigh. Just an extra day!

Intermission

2009-06-03T23:48:00.000-07:00

So it's summer. I moved apartments, made an emergency trip to Seattle, got old(er), started an internship at the unparalleled Stamen Design and bought, like, curtains for, like, my bedroom. I have an actual bedroom now; separate from the living room; an all the way down the hall, can't hear the @#@!&(# street noise, warm at night bedroom. It's exciting. Plus there are all these new surfaces to remove the cat from. This business has successfully digested a month and now it's June.

I was going to start a project to figure out a way to pull data from San Francisco's DBI site. They have a tool that allows you to look up building permits and complaints for any building you have an address for. When I was apartment hunting last month (or last, last month) it was comforting to see whether or not the apartment I was looking at had been reported for nasty mold problems or holes in the ceiling. Not a necessary tool by any means but fun. Unfortunately they don't allow random automated scripts to pull info from their site‚Äìbooooo. Along those lines, I also looked on the SF courts website to see how often my old landlord had been taken to court. That was fun. Now if only I had known about public records 10 years ago when I rented an apartment from that guy who was busted for human trafficking.

I had another final project for my Interactive Studio which I never documented here because although I had a semi-working version for the final, I wasn't completely happy with it. I'll post some screenshots, though, for fun.

Mentions of War in the NYTimes from 1981-2009

2009-04-29T13:20:00.000-07:00

One down, two to go. This is one of my final projects for my interactive studio. I figured I'd go ahead and document it before I forgot about it. Plus, I just got back a 42x30" poster and it's perty.

So this graph is the updated version of its little cousin. I just changed the proportions of the graph so it would fit in a traditional poster size (and was therefore cheaper to print), let the highest bars display off the chart so it was easier to see the smaller number of mentions, and rewrote the code a tad so it would display the number of mentions and the war mentioned on the actual bar as well as printing the months at the bottom of the print. I also removed the random opacity. It added a nice texture but it didn't really add any information. Instead, I made all the bars slightly transparent so it was possible to see other wars underneath it. Here's a close-up.

Yay! One project down. Two more to complete.

Interaction Studio Final Project - Part One

2009-04-18T19:52:00.000-07:00

For our Interaction Scripting Studio final project, I am focusing on my data visualizations of war, films, media and probably death counts (or maybe just make puppy viewer work dynamically).

So tons of websites with large amounts of data are making APIs available to developers for application development and visualization (Flickr, Twitter, NYTimes, pretty much any next gen website, etc). There are also sites that provide visualization tools for you and encourage experimentation. The NYTimes Viz Lab is one of them. They provide a set number of datasets and a number of tools (like Wordle) and let people go crazy. Google also provides tons of tools including their Google Visualization API. IBM's Many Eyes takes it a step further and allows users to add their own data sets.

It's an exciting field and it makes my brain buzz. However, I found this article in SEED Magazine Getting Past the Pie Chart that talks about how, perhaps, the data viz explosion may not be making data any clearer. There is also a very real danger of making causal connections where none exist.

Still, data visualization done well can be a combination of design and science which becomes beautiful, meaningful and inspiring. I absolutely love it. Here is a screenshot of a project I'm working on. It's the further refinement of one of my original circle graphs. What I'd like to do is see if I can add some more stats to the graph without overloading it. In my head that means tilting the graph back to add a third dimension and perhaps including casualty data vertically from each war (and if I can find it, for each movie the films are about).

Dipity

2009-04-17T22:54:00.000-07:00

In the wilds of social media websites there's this thing. I wish these sites would stop using baby talk names, but that seems to be de rigueur these days. (Has somebody made a random web 2.0 startup name generator?) Anyway, in doing research for a non-school project (I welcome the approach of summer) I found this Dipity. As much as I try to keep up with every site I can sign up for‚ÄìI seem to enjoy collecting site accounts‚ÄìI only heard about this site now. I wonder how many aggregators of aggregators there are and a) who might end up being the umbrella organization or b) if there can even be one anymore. The interface is fun, however, and I like that you can zoom out 500 years.

amy e martin on Dipity.

procrastinating student + flickr api = ?

2009-04-11T02:31:00.000-07:00

The end of the semester is three weeks away. I have a game to program, a visualization or two to finish and a research paper and business plan to write. Yet for whatever reason, all I could do today was start making this thing. (For some context, Miss Trish is the name of a stray dog with a crazy under bite that I saw in a book called Street Dogs.)

So this is a tag search for the word "pomeranian" on Flickr. I wrote a Processing program that takes tag input, creates a url, sends it, parses the response and then spits out an html page. I spend such an inordinate amount of time looking at cute (and ridiculous) dogs on the internet that I thought it might be fun to see how many dogs I could handle looking at at once. A lot, apparently.

Anyway, it's in progress. If I have time I will figure out a way to add a web interface (so, perhaps if someone wants to look at tons of pictures of butterflies on flickr all at once, they need not go through page after page of scrollin'). Also, the images should probably link to the flickr page instead of just the image. Either way, I should probably get back to my school work, even though it doesn't involve hundreds of pictures of puppies.