At first glance, I thought the display was about U.S. politics, but on a closer inspection, it was about something different. America’s Got No Talent by Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki is an interactive data visualization piece that shows the opinions of American reality TV shows (such as America’s Got Talent, The X Factor, American Idol, and more) through the lens of twitter feeds that mention the shows. It uses the time when the tweet was posted and its retweets to help create a measurement for the connection between a show’s success and it’s activity on social media. The display uses the image of the American flag as its interface, and sticks to the red, white, and blue colors. In person, there were two parts: the giant screen where the exhibit was being displayed, and a white stand which had a smaller screen where the user could interact with. The stand also labeled where on the map the user can interact with and what it will do. The display was interesting to see and play with in person. The interactive element made the data visualization fun and added an exploration aspect, from trying to see what the work ad to offer.

 

CodeProfiles is by W.Bradford Paley and made using Java. The work looks at how people might read the code by tracing it, how the programmer would interact with the code, adding notes and jumping around, and highlights where the code would be executed multiple times. The use of green colored text on the black background displays the code in a more familiar/ traditional context. Seeing the wall of code at the museum made me feel both intimidated by the numerous lines of code, but I was also fascinated by seeing it all laid out. During my coding experiences, I haven’t had many opportunities to see my code laid out in full, usually a small section that can fit onto my computer screen. But by being able to see the entire code as a whole, it made it easier to pin point where there where changes the display, such when certain lines of code light up or when lines are drawn.