I came across Sarah Groff Palermo’s “Shape of my Library”, where Palermo compiled a list of all of the books in her library that she’s read. She then represented each book as a small dot with a color based on the book genre. Mousing over an individual dot shows a popup text box describing how Palermo emotionally responded to that specific book, which remains unnamed. Clicking on the “Sort books” button separates the mass of dots into smaller groups, with the mass being divided based on the book genre. Each smaller group of books forms an ellipse with all having the same color, and each group has its individual dots slowly move around to naturally settle together.

I’ve always liked data representation of dots, and I like how Palermo personalized the data art to be hers, showing the group identity of genres, but also including how each book evoked a specific emotional response. It’s easy to neglect the individual, moving parts of a group, but Palermo intentionally includes it in the text descriptions and animation of each dot.

Research Post 2: Data Art

Data Portraits at TED 2017– Accuat Studio

https://www.accurat.it/works/ted/

Accuat Studio was tasked with coming up with a unique experience that could bring people together by using personal data to create a unique and revealing experience by TED and David Stark Design for Target. People were asked a set of simple questions that showed facts about participants to create individualized designs. Questions included, “Which TED letter are you?” “When do you get your best ideas?”, as well as reading, rules, emails, and work space preferences. Design Director Giorgia Lupi turned the answers from the participants’ quizzes into data visualizations on her iPad using the code below. She drew the designs based on a pre-defined visual system. The designs were curated live at the Target activation space during conference breaks. People also had the option of using a tablet app that was pre-made to fill out a questionnaire that would generate portraits in seconds. These data portraits were turned into wearable buttons, given back to participant with a guide to reading the data portraits. More than 500 data portraits were generated and distributed during TED 2017. The personalized buttons were worn by attendees during the first five days of the events.

 

Process: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/hagdf8th0wqct8k/TED_instagram_video.mp4?dl=0

https://www.accurat.it/works/worldpotus/

video link: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/d8gip9eu6h0vvu4/world_potus_tablet.mp4?dl=0

Google News Lab

The artists transform countries into bubbles, bouncing around as the user switches from topic to topic and sticking to each other depending on additional information on search habits. To visualize the data, the artists make use of variables such as colour, size and position of bubbles. I found this art piece pretty interactive because the balls change size, colour and position based on how the data and topic change. And the transition is very smooth. Details of issues they are representing is left out or simplified by the visualization due to limited size of bubbles. Using visual elements to represent data, the artists need to prioritize both artistic effect and readability of data, because artistic effect determines how people perceive the image and readability of data determines how much information they can receive.

Exhibition Title:  ‘Unlikely Avian Taxonomies’
Designers:          Zoë Sadokierski and Kate Sweetapple.

In this project, Zoe and Kate categorized birds in 5 new taxonomies based on their names, and visualized the data of two taxonomies. Their research method is called exploratory data mining. They tried to find birds name with potential to be visualized, reading through more than 31,500 birds names.

First taxonomy are birds with “spots” or “stripes” in their name. Designers cut out several “birds” from a piece of paper, and put this paper on the other paper that has spots or stripes on it. As a result, it looks like birds with spots or stripes on their body.

The second taxonomy are birds with color in their names. They ended up with 3,442 birds categorised under 87 different colors. In order to visually display the data, they tried several ways: dots of different color, names in different color, and a pie chat to show the amount of birds.

here’s the link of their project:

https://cargocollective.com/katesweetapple/Unlikely-Avian-Taxonomies

https://cargocollective.com/katesweetapple/Mr-Salmon-and-Mrs-Sparrow-Experimental-Cartography

 

This exhibition, “Mr. Salmon and Mrs. Sparrow,” by Kate Sweetapple is a cartography experiment that is a collection of six different maps of Sydney, Australia. Yet each map is only comprised of one type of unique, unusual reference point: celestial bodies, fish, birds, or people whose last names are colors. The result is six different art pieces in the shape of the map of Sydney. I find this these maps especially interesting because, even though this exhibition is geographically precise and demographically accurate, the maps provide no “useful” information.

I really enjoyed this exhibition because the artist, Kate Sweetapple, painstakingly remained so scientifically accurate yet contradicted herself at the same time by having these six maps be practically useless for locating places or being informative. The only purpose that these maps were made for was to be artwork–not for function. Out of the infinite number of objects to redesign, I thought that the artist choosing to redesign a map into art was an interesting choice since the primary purpose that map is usually made only for function and relaying information. But to me, this contradiction between the art and the function of the map is what makes this piece interesting.

 

Invisible Infrastructures: Understanding Autonomous Systems by Share Foundation

The Internet nowadays is an indispensabele and invisible infrastructure that provides us an unlimit opportunities. Due to its invisibility, it’s seldom discuss and people have limited knowledege about how they deal with our data or how those networks are interconnected, but these are actually significant aspects to understand.

In order to deal with these, they first understand the structure of our nearest network, which is owned and runed by tens of thousands of internet service provider (ISP). Because every device connecting to the internet has an IP address, which allows data to flow over the internet, they used IP ranges of ISPto create a Network Topology map for every of them.

In this case, there are more than 300,000 different IP addresses and links between huge sets of data. To visualize these, they used Gephi which is a platform able to display, manipulate and transform the network into a map. And this help them to obtain a form of 30 different maps of ISPs in Sebria. For each different structures, they can not only learn the network structure analysis, efficiency of the network and the aspect of each network security, but also private related misuse of the network, content control, and surveillance. And the three basic network structures are centralized, decentralized, and distributed.

However, their analysis is still based on an individual ISP, which is just a small fragment of the entirety. In order to create a more thorough pucture of the story and further understand more deeply, they will have to also examine local interconnectoins and links to the internationl networks.

Twitter Conversation Trees is a work of data art created by design technologist Peter Beshai to accompany a presentation for Deb Roy and Bridgit Mendler. The work seeks to visualize the toxicity in conversations on twitter. A twitter post is modeled in real time as a cone shaped tree, which branches out from the replies. The more toxic a reply thread is, the more withered it’s branch appears. The data is extracted from popular public posts, using methodology and criteria developed by Bridgit Mendler. In order to generate the visual Beshai primarily utilized Houdini, which meshed well with the generative nature of the project and his background in programing. Furthermore Houdini had excellent python compatibility which complemented the use of the Python library Tulip to structure the trees.

The author takes a fairly neutral stance on the issue on internet toxicity in this piece. The piece conveys the amount of toxicity on twitter, without making a judgement on what one’s reaction should be. This is likely because the presentation this was displayed in was done with scientific intention and therefore had little intent on passing judgement, instead focusing more on the methodology used to register toxicity in a post. While the presentation did, the artwork itself does not display the actual contents of the threads rendered toxic. Instead it chooses to focus on the patterns and prevalence of toxicity in general.

link: https://medium.com/cortico/visualizing-toxicity-in-twitter-conversations-3cd336e5db81

WorldPOTUS

Accuat Studio developed interactive program, known as WorldPOTUS, during the season of the 2016 US presidential election, a political event that seemed to have sparked strong partisanship, media coverage, and interest rates unlike any other election season in recent memory. The rapture of the election and its candidate didn’t stop at American borders, so Accuat Studios, working with data from Google Trends made accessible with collaboration with members of Google News Labs, synthesized this project to represent the global interest rates of top political issues for each candidate. By using data of Google searches based on location, the studio created this as part of a experiment in how to further implement Google data into the news industry.

The studio used opensource for the coding, with the program being based on React framework and WebGL. One of the biggest consideration of how the data is being displayed is the use of more free form “blobs.” Since human opinions are always shifting, it would be inaccurate to simply use a precise geometry to represent them. Instead, the visuals are fluidly moving to better demonstrate a general sense of conclusion that can be taken from analysis of the data, rather than regarding the data as perfect. The developers are widening the horizons of American politics to show that its impact can be felt worldwide, that it is not just the American people who have an input on what is happening. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that the rest of the world have their eyes on the United States and who citizens are electing to be their representative. The data visualization does lack in showing the position of other countries on the candidates and their stance on major political majors. A nation could be expressing particular interest in a candidate on a certain issue because they may support that candidate. For that matter, the program also doesn’t say what each candidate has said about the political matters at hand. There has to be some sort of reasoning for why some issues are trending more than others.

http://www.worldpotus.com/#/

 

 

Harvard Library Haystacks by Rachel Binx

The Harvard Library Haystacks shows the books in the Harvard Library by publication date, the subject of the book, and popularity. The user could also enter a search term to narrow down the books shown on the visualization. It also provides the names and authors of the books that showed up on the graph. The data was provided by the Harvard Library Lab, and it is not stated on how the visualization was made.

In this visualization, it was clear to see the patterns and trends of certain ideas and books at Harvard throughout time. The user could see that most of the popular books in the library were based in science and medicine, or that there was a drastic increase of publications about the internet in 2000s. This design prioritized the simple and clear representation of the books, by using colored circles to represent the different subjects.

This visualization is leaving out the demographic of the students and faculty in Harvard of where the data was taken from. The studies of the students would reflect the types of books that are checked out of the library. Thus the trends in the graphs could be reflective of the courses taken by the students.

Kiss R. Luke DuBois high-definition video, 2010

In his work “Kiss”, Luke DuBois visualized 50 iconic embraces from the history of cinema through a non-photorealistic rendering technique developed by the artist. The technique analyzes the footage by looking at details in the source that resemble the lips of the kissing actors and redrawing them with points tinted to match the colors of the original film. The data used in this project are the vertex of the figures within the images. These are most likely detected by identifying a high contrast in color between two nearby pixels. The software then connect all the dots to create a work of moving string art that entwines the actors performing the kiss in a new, geometric embrace of connecting lines.

Only the highlights of the lips, hair, and clothing are emphasized and tinted, while other parts of the images was filled in by the lines created by vectorization. Dubois prioritized the forms and movement of the points. He did not put much emphasize on recreating the color scheme of the films featured in the video. He also left out the background, leaving an empty space in between the human figures and in the background.