First of all, have a lovely Thanksgiving break. (Our class will not meet this coming week.)
Email
It’s time to start thinking about your final projects. Select a social network data source (if you have an alternate type of source discuss it with me first) that frequently updates and returns a lot of information. I recommend Twitter, but if you’re attached to another live dataset that’s acceptable. Does it provide user names? Date and time? Geographic locations? Locations within a connectivity network? A text payload? Avatars? Hyperlinks? Links to other users / items / objects in the network? List as many items as you can for your data source. Then imagine some creative ways of harnessing or comparing those pieces of data. How can relationships between separate pieces of data reveal something new? How can 1+1=3? And what story does this tell? How can a data visualization have a narrative? For this Tuesday, email me answers to the above and a synopsis of your attack plan. You may complete your final project solo, or in groups of 2 or 3. Let me know who your partners are.
Build
For next class, show me Twitter. Pick aspects of Twitter data that appeal to you and represent that somehow on a sphere. You might think of this a two problem project. The first problem is accessing data from Twitter that includes latitude, longitude, and some payload that you would like to display. (You might try looking at the Twitter4J library, HTML and RSS scraping, or other.) The second problem is displaying this on a sphere. To partially answer Peter’s question, here’s a cluttered example of plotting points according to lat/long that maintain a “pleasant” rotation: texturedSphere2.zip. Remember, you don’t need to do anything to the latitude and longitude values (other than use the radians function) because lat and long were devised for plotting points on a sphere. This means you do not need to worry about Map Projections or converting to Cartesian space, etc. So how might you add Paths and Agents to this to make easy animations? What about being able to save animation frames, or render out movie frames? Wow me.
Contemplate
If you choose to continue using Twitter for your final presentation then this may build towards that goal. If not, that’s also acceptable. (And your final need not be on a sphere!) While you’re working on this project I want you to continue to think about your final. How will it differ? What things have you learned from this semester that you might incorporate into your final project? For this week’s homework do your own exercise independently, but for the final you may choose to work with one or two other partners.
Listen
Also, listen to Paul Graham’s “Hackers and Painters” interview. I realized that the earlier Paul Graham listening that I assigned you my have been too off-putting to get at the really interesting ideas he proposes. What does he say painters and hackers have in common? (In contrast to say, how architects and engineers might interact.) Please respond to this listening on your blog before next class.
