Literary License Blog

Wisdom of the Crowd: People Are Lonely, for Being Lone

May 6, 2014 by in Python

For my final for Reading and Writing Electronic Text, I am exploring using the “wisdom of the crowd” to answer a simple question: What is the experience of loneliness?

The idea of answering a question using the “wisdom of the crowd” is derived from an experiment by Sir Francis Galton in 1907, when he asked 787 villagers to guess the weight of an ox. Individual responses varied wildly, but the average of all these responses was within one pound of the real weight of the ox. The wisdom of the crowd uses the collective opinion of a group of individuals to answer a question. Modern day examples include Wikipedia and Google.

I collected from the internet ~100 quotes on the experience of loneliness from well-known people throughout history. I wrote a program in Python to mashup the wisdom quotes by combining portions of each quote together to create new quotes, in effect sampling from my loneliness canon. I took my mashed-up quotes, and used character markov-chain analysis to generate new text that is statistically similar to the original quotes. I ran my statistically generated text through the markov-chain analysis 1-3 times, just to make sure my text was nicely average.

So, according to the wisdom of the crowd, what is the experience of loneliness?

  • People are Lonely, for Being Lone
  • Loneliness can be conquered only by Lonely people
  • If you’re lonely than There is a loneliness
  • Loneliness is more lonely
  • People are lonely when you’re alone

I used this generative collective wisdom to create a poem, three stanzas in length, to help distill the wisdom of the crowd on the topic of loneliness. Many thanks to the intellects whose wisdom I stole to inform this new poetic form: → Read more

ITP ListServ Network Visualization

April 12, 2014 by in Data Visualization, Processing, Python

ITP is a two year graduate program at NYU focused on the intersection of art and technology, “a Center for the Recently Possible.” One way a sense of community and connection is facilitated is with the ITP student listserv, host to all sorts of email conversations between students on everything from missing power chargers to animated gifs and pop culture.

My experience of the ITP student listserv upon arriving at ITP in the Fall of 2013 was one of mostly confusion, my inbox suddenly overwhelmed by a barrage of emails from people I didn’t know replete with animated gifs and insider jokes. By the Spring Semester of this year, my sense of the listserv was that it seemed largely dominated by Second Year students, who seemed to mainly just be speaking with Second Year students with minimal participation by First Year students.

I decided to test my theory by gathering my gmail data and creating a network visualization of the ITP listserv.

ITP Listserv Network Visualization

First Year students are grouped on the right hand side of the circle, and Second Year students on the left side. The density of lines is much greater on the left side of the circle, indicating there are more public conversations taking place between Second Year students.

During the process of researching for this project, I discovered an ITP student listserv network visualization made in 2007 by Joshua Knowles. My visualization chooses as its reference point the 2007 visualization, but I have many ideas to expand on this earlier visualization including making the visualization interactive so users can more deeply explore the data, and visually exploring the class imbalance of listserv usage.

I believe it is important to explore data in context. Once my data visualization is interactive, I would like to user-test it with ITP students, while also getting feedback from students on their own individual experience of the listserv and the ways it could be improved upon.

So how did I create this visualization? With Dan Shiffman’s guidance, I wrote a Processing program to visualize the ITP ListServ:
→ Read more

Functions and Python

April 10, 2014 by in Python

For this week’s homework in Reading and Writing Electronic Text, I took two Python programs and rewrote the programs to be functions. Here is the revised sketch for my Corporate Motto mashup program:

→ Read more

The Art of Getting Lost: Mapping, Walking and Art

April 9, 2014 by in Data Visualization

“The point of my work is my own physical engagement with the world in different ways, whether it’s walking, or making fingerprints, or throwing stones.” – Richard Long

In August of last year, I spent a week solo hiking in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Near the end of my trip, I hiked 5 miles of boulder fields completely cloaked in fog. I felt as though a nomadic explorer, lost in some other-world because all I could see at any point in time was a wall of grey mist that occasionally parted to reveal a short glimpse of the trail, arm’s length in reach.

All the Grays

I have no idea what I hiked through that day, I imagine the experience is similar to Gianni Motti’s 6-hour long walk through the Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile long underground particle accelerator tunnel:

“After 2 kilometers, I lost all notions of time and space. I don’t remember anything, I was elsewhere.” – Gianni Motti

Walking, it turns out, is beautiful. 

→ Read more

Data Art: Psychogeography, and Walking as An Art Form

April 1, 2014 by in Data Visualization

“The world cannot be recorded, it can only be remade.”
-Walking and Mapping by Karen O’Rourke

While reviewing the readings for Data Art this past week, I was surprised to find myself feeling incredibly inspired. Many of the examples Jer Thorp showed in class included work I had seen before. Midway through the readings, I had a sudden, random thought (and idea!) What if I walked the streets of Manhattan in order to deliberately write a message on the city grid? What would I say that would be so important (or perhaps, not important at all?) Or, what if I just drew a deliberate pattern, my trail a continuous line drawing. Was there a point to such an exercise?

When I initially had this idea, I wasn’t sure if it was very good as I couldn’t explain in concrete terms why I wanted to undertake it. But when I shared the idea with fellow ITP-ers, everyone seemed to just instantly “get” the concept. It was exciting then to validate my idea, and discover a long history of walking as an art form, in Karen O’Rourke’s Walking and Mapping. 

Mapping is a way to locate ourselves, and our situation in the world, and act upon it. Walking is a personal yet universal experience. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that artists have long played with the concept of walking as an art form.

Traverse Me, Jeremy Wood, continuous GPS drawing

Traverse Me, Jeremy Wood, continuous GPS drawing

The first chapter explores “psychogeography” as an alternative way of reading the city. Psychogeographers decode urban space by moving through it in unexpected ways. Alternative ways of walking through a city are an attempt to de-familiarize one’s self to one’s environment:

“The stumbling block for people who are familiar with an area is a selective gaze that ignores everything but what is necessary for the task at hand. We see only what we expect to see.”
- Mapping and Walking, Karen O’Rourke

The Situationists, on the other hand, briefly embraced the concept of experiencing a city by “drifting” through it without aim.  → Read more

Propaganda Poetry

March 27, 2014 by in Python

It’s time to write a program to make a poem! I decided to make propaganda poetry for Reading and Writing Electronic Text. Hopefully very bad propaganda poetry.

I dug up some books from the library and compiled a text file with war slogans from World War Two posters (British and American.) I also created a text file with headlines from The Economist (always mysteriously poetic!) and threw in my corporate mottos to the mix for good measure.

I think the results are actually pretty good for being fairly nonsensical. Here are my favorite poems that were generated. (You can find the code for the program at the end of this post.)

Poem One
Relearning old lessons
we trust
All that glitters is
kill

This is the enemy.

Keep that lumber coming!
Is your trip necessary?
Grow vitamins at your kitchen door.

Just a good afternoon’s
Bad ventilation ruins ammunition.

Poem Two
Buy victory bonds. Invest.
Come into the factories.
United we are strong.
Do it! Keep ‘em firing!

The daily diary of
neighbor, State Farm is there

A few careless words
If you are bombed

→ Read more

ITP ListServ Visualization: Getting My Gmail Data Using Python Gmail Library

March 18, 2014 by in Data Visualization, Python

Today I figured out how to use this Gmail Python Library to fetch Gmail data for my ITP listserv visualization. First up, I installed the Gmail Python library by cloning the GitHub repo to a folder on my local computer.

In Terminal, I changed directories so I was in the directory where I saved the library.

I then installed the GMail Python library:

And opened the Python Interpreter in Terminal:

and ran these commands to log-in to my Gmail Account:

This command accesses messages labeled “ITP” in my Inbox: → Read more

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