I am tackling what at times feels like a herculean Data Representation project, although on paper it sounds easy: visualize the connections between folks who use the ITP student listserv. In 2007, Joshua Knowles did just that.
This post is about how to not tackle this project.
For my first attempt at getting my gmail data, I ran this Python script and downloaded 6,126 emails (as separate text files) sent to the ITP listserv from Sept 5, 2013-Present. Luckily, Gmail has been archiving these emails for me in a separate folder in my Inbox (plus one for me!) I then attempted to adapt one of Dan O’Sullivan’s Gmail Word Count Processing sketches in order to loop through each text file, grab the From and Subject line and write to a CSV file. This turns out to be exactly the kind of sketch that crashes Processing. It’s just too much data for Processing + my computer to manage given I do not need each email (and all of that data including attachments) for this project. → Read more
For Recurring Concepts in Art, Joelle and I are taking my Instacollages and remaking them without technology. The process of deconstructing my original project has forced me several times over to reflect on the motivations and process that led to Instacollage.
Joelle found this great quote which sums up collage and juxtaposition quite nicely:
“In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it, and over it.” Johann Goethe
One of the things you learn as photographer is that there is a process that happens by which we become familiar with our surroundings to the point we stop “seeing.”
“Before you have focused your thoughts you are all over the place, because you are searching. You are feeling. You are looking for things. You do not know what you are doing. You are lost. You are in a maze. So thinking is number one in the design process. The design is the product of your thinking.”
-Paul Rand
For my second pass at my Corporate Motto mashups, I recombined mottos by splitting each motto based on a certain number of words and recombining the mottos into a new motto.
The first round of mashups returned some funny results, but mainly mottos that almost sounded like they could be real mottos. Some of my favorite ones:
Even your best friends won’t tell you!
Snap! Crackle! Pop! just one!
You’ve come a long way, baby.
We Help You life.
It looks good, it cleans your teeth.
I then took the first results, and passed them back into my corporate motto program. Round two returned much more ridiculous mashups: → Read more
For my first Python program that mashes up text, I chose to work with corporate mottos. I first manually copied over 400 corporate mottos from this pdf file into a text file. I then used Adam’s Cowboy.py program, which replaces common words (you, I, the, etc) with cowboy slang. However, I chose to replace those words with California slang (dude, hella, totally, whatever, etc).
Here is the text replacement program:
Text Replacement with Surf Slang
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import sys
forline insys.stdin:
line=line.strip()
line=line.replace("the ","hella ")
line=line.replace("and ","like yeah, ")
line=line.replace(" a "," like whatever ")
line=line.replace("!",". Dude.")
line=line.replace(","," totally ")
print line
And a few examples of the result with this initial translation:
Ace is hella place for hella helpful hardware man.
Jer asked us to remix a fellow ITP student’s assignment. I chose to remix Billy Dang’s visualization of the frequency of the words red, green and blue in the New York Times from the past 100 years.
However, I chose to map the frequency of the words cyan, magenta and yellow to create CMYK data visualizations. → Read more
The second week of Rune Madsen’s Printing Code course explores shape and form. The homework assignment for the week: “Write a Processing sketch that outputs 2 shapes on a page. The first shape should be inspired by the word “wet.” The second shape should be inspired by the word “sharp”. Use only black and white. You have to use beginShape(), and all vertex points have to be created in a for loop. No manual plotting.”
It took me a little while to figure out what shape I wanted to draw for the word “wet.” Initially I wanted to do something organic and abstracted – lines in the shape of water reflections or ripples, but lines aren’t shapes in the end. The word “wet” brings to mind something fluid and amorphous, liquid and transparent but reflective, round and repetitive. Drawing a raindrop seemed like a nice, albeit stereotypical representation of the word “wet.” → Read more