Daily Practice – Day 5 (2022-10-23)
As I finished reading Sunscreens and Photoaging: A Review of Current Literature, I was struct by how much jargon there is in not only this article, but also a lot of articles discussing skincare in general. It makes the decisions we make about what sunscreen is best for us, and the environment extremely difficult. This word cloud is representative of an idea to display all of the jargon, scientific and chemical words that a consumer has to wade through while making this choice. For this representation, I parsed the words from Sunscreens and Photoaging and spent a bit of time deciding a set of words to not include in the image – mostly removing common words that were not specific to sunscreen research. This process itself was pretty interesting. From the perspective of data integrity, this feels like cheating – I was manipulating the data which changed the outcome of the representation which leads into some questions I had with project 1 regarding scientific accuracy within art projects. Maybe this is okay, if the intention and process is clear to the audience?
I created a small ruby script to manipulate the data, that I’ll also include here: