data representation

ITP ListServ Network Visualization

April 12, 2014 by michellechandra 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.

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

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

March 18, 2014 by michellechandra 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.


git clone git://github.com/charlierguo/gmail.git

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git clone git://github.com/charlierguo/gmail.git

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


cd /Users/michellechandra/rwet/gmail

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cd /Users/michellechandra/rwet/gmail

I then installed the GMail Python library:


python setup.py

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python setup.py

And opened the Python Interpreter in Terminal:


python

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python

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


import gmail

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import gmail


g = gmail.login('username'. 'password')

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g = gmail.login('username'. 'password')

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

Data Representation: ITP ListServ Visualization

March 18, 2014 by michellechandra in Data Visualization, Python

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

Data Art: The New York Times and CMYK

February 13, 2014 by michellechandra in Data Visualization, Processing

Snow storm = programming time.

Tonight, I focused on altering Jer Thorp’s NYT radial graph code to create abstract (yet aesthetically pleasing) data visualizations for my Data Art Class at ITP.

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

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