April 22, 2008
March 04, 2008
Midterm a2z
February 26, 2008
Midterm
From Wikipedia:
“On February 4, 2008, several rallies were held in Colombia and in other locations around the world, criticizing FARC (Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia) and demanding the liberation of hundreds of hostages. The protests were originally organized through the social networking site Facebook. Millions of people in Colombia and thousands worldwide participated in the rallies.”
The Facebook-promoted global protest against FARC is a cas d’ecole of the power of social networking as a means to foster civic and political engagement across different countries and social groups. Looked closely, it made evident subtle processes that operate at the levels of culture and language, such as the alarming process of polarization of opinion in all sides of the Colombian political spectrum. A reflection of this are the online discussion forums of El Tiempo, the country's most influential newspaper: the content and tone of the entries reflect the tendency to radicalize against political opponents of either side. While supporters of the government consider anyone holding slightly leftist positions as guerrilla, conversely, those supporting the government are labeled as accomplices of the paramilitary death-squads. This dynamics has quietly generated a reversal of ethical values among Colombians of all political parties, to an extent in which members of either side tend to condemn the atrocities of only one of the actors in the conflict, while justifying the others.
The level of language violence in these public forums is a reflection of the surrounding physical violence, and can be analyzed as a function of the kind of media coverage that a given particular instance of a forum is about. The hypothesis is that the wages of the public’s opinion are affected (exacerbated or otherwise) by the language and inherent political biases of the corresponding newspaper or social network, and that this can be made visible through technical XXX in order to produce a compelling artistic reflection of the complex interplay between reality, media and individual and group politics.
February 19, 2008
week 03
For the past two week I've been reading Ben Fry's Visualizing Data book and trying to think in ways to implement his graphic technics with the text analysis content of the class.
Right now i just have one working version of the networked graphics visualizing the most used words in a text, in this case one of the latest speech of the current Colombian president.
January 28, 2008
Week 01
For my first assignment I worked with several newspapers headlines taking advantage of its "flexible" grammar. The code splits each line and each word of every line, keeping the first word of each headline in an array, and then reconstructing the text, assigning randomly the initial word.
The original text:
* Iraqi Head Seeks Arms
* Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says
* Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers
* Enraged Cow Injures Farmer with Ax
* Farmer Bill Dies in House
* British Left Waffles on Falkland Islands
* Teacher Strikes Idle Kids
* Miners Refuse to Work after Death
* Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant
* War Dims Hope for Peace
* If Strike Isn't Settled Quickly, It May Last Awhile
* Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures
* Enfield (London) Couple Slain; Police Suspect Homicide
* Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges
* Man Struck By Lightning Faces Battery Charge
* New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group
* Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas in Spacecraft
* Kids Make Nutritious Snacks
* Chef Throws His Heart into Helping Feed Needy
* Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half
* Hospitals are Sued by 7 Foot Doctors
* Typhoon Rips Through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead
The result:
Something Head Seeks Arms
Juvenile Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says
Juvenile Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers
Hospitals Cow Injures Farmer with Ax
New Bill Dies in House
Enfield Left Waffles on Falkland Islands
British Strikes Idle Kids
Red Refuse to Work after Death
Farmer Court to Try Shooting Defendant
Red Dims Hope for Peace
New Strike Isn't Settled Quickly, It May Last Awhile
Red Wave Linked to Temperatures
War (London) Couple Slain; Police Suspect Homicide
Teacher Tape Holds Up New Bridges
War Struck By Lightning Faces Battery Charge
Cold Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group
Kids Takes Blame for Gas in Spacecraft
null Make Nutritious Snacks
Farmer Throws His Heart into Helping Feed Needy
Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half
Local are Sued by 7 Foot Doctors
Iraqi Rips Through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead
Main part of the code:
String[] lines = content.split("\\*");
System.out.println("Read " + lines.length + " lines from " + args[0]);
String[] fwords= new String[lines.length];
StringBuffer result = new StringBuffer();
for( int i=1; i
String[] words = lines[i].split("\\b");
System.out.println("Read " + words.length + " words from line" + i);
fwords[i]=words[1];
}
for( int i=1; i
String[] allwords = lines[i].split("\\b");
Random r = new Random();
int first = r.nextInt(fwords.length);
allwords[1]=fwords[first];
for(int j=0;j
result.append(allwords[j]);
}
}
String output = result.toString();