Category Archives: Comm Lab: Networked Media

Comm Lab: Networked Media, Kaini Zhou, Lauren McCarthy, Projects

Mister Mister

Kaini Zhou

Mister Mister is a website documenting the stories between me and all the men I slept with, as a way to probe today's online dating scene, hookup culture, and the building and fading of interpersonal relationships in a contemporary urban environment from a young woman's perspective. The website encourages audience to think about their own stories and appreciate whoever wrote a story in their lives.

http://www.kainizhou.me/?p=171

Description

This website Mister Mister is a collection of individual profiles of guys I slept with. They might be my long-term relationship ex, or someone I met on Tinder. For each of them, I review the experience, give him an advice, and leave a note to myself. Viewers can write back to me if they think they are one of the guys or have slept with one of them.

I do not hope this project to be a brag about my sexual history. Instead, I take a closer look at people's mentality of dating, hooking up and having sex in general, and question myself on my growth as a woman. All the reviews are not graphic in any sense, because deep inside I think they are all interesting human beings. This is also a mark on myself to pause my online dating/hookup journey, and think about what I really need and want in this city at this age.

Classes

Comm Lab: Networked Media

Comm Lab: Networked Media, Lauren McCarthy, Lutfiadi Rahmanto, Projects

Top European Soccer Teams' Source of Talents

Lutfiadi Rahmanto

Visualizing top european soccer teams' source of talents, buying renowned players, under radar or nurturing their own.

http://ucl-team-composition.herokuapp.com/

Description

This data visualization shows where teams that play in UEFA Champions League (UCL) get their players from, whether from stronger or weaker team. Holding the most tweeted sport event in 2012, UCL is one of the most celebrated sport event in the world. To draw a comparison, UCL is to Europe as Super Bowl is to USA. (Further explanation http://ble.ac/1Aezofu)

The story behind this, is each football team have their own method to build their squad. Teams who are recently bought by ultra-billionaire tend to go on spending-spree luring well-established player from top teams. While there are teams who have scouts with keen eye to recruit talents under the radar. And there are teams who rely on their own academy, nurturing young talents. The order of strength of the teams is defined by UEFA Ranking (http://uefa.to/1jZYau4) that measures performance of teams who play in European continental competition.

The visualization will be depicted in 3D cylindrical coordinate, where each players are represented as spheres. The closer the sphere to the center means he comes from stronger team. There is also a circle on the plane to show the the difference in ranking between his current and previous team. The color of the sphere represents categorical variable (whether they come from stronger team, weaker team, or club's academy).

From this visualization, there are several stories that could be noticed. England clubs tend to buy players from strong teams. Top three teams (none are from England) trust their own academy and have several homegrown veterans in their squads.

Classes

Comm Lab: Networked Media

Comm Lab: Networked Media, Daniel Shiffman, Introduction to Computational Media, Projects, Ross Goodwin

Fiction Generator

Ross Goodwin

Generates full-length, customizable novels from a massive set of collective consciousness narratives.

http://fictiongenerator.com

Description

FicGen draws from the complete archives of multiple websites, restructures text corpora, and inserts generated characters to construct full-length novels. Users can select and adjust various attributes of the generated novels through a graphical user interface. Customizable attributes include: title, character names, genre, conflict, length, character count, passion, realism, density, and depravity.

The websites FicGen draws material from include Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org), tvtropes.org, erowid.org, and scp-wiki.net. I started with tvtropes.org, a self-described wiki of “the tricks of the trade for writing fiction.” The tvtropes wiki contains an extraordinary variety of fiction “tropes”—recurring motifs, themes, or elements that are present in nearly all fiction. By extracting the text from wiki articles, changing the verbs to past tense, and inserting character names in the place of personal pronouns, I found I could create compelling character descriptions, setting descriptions, and some exposition.

I used variations on the same technique (changing verbs to past tense, replacing personal pronouns with character names) on materials from the other three websites. Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org) contains over 46,000 free, public domain books in ASCII format; erowid.org contains over 18,000 drug experience reports; and scp-wiki.net is a horror fiction website containing nearly 3,000 fictional reports on various supernatural entities and objects.

By choosing chapter structures based on user-defined attributes, I found I could combine altered versions of these materials into complete novels, with consistent character names providing continuity. All materials, except erowid.org experience reports, are either in the public domain or licensed under Creative Commons, and official permission is pending for the use of erowid.org experience reports.

Blog Posts

http://www.thehypertext.com/tag/fiction-generator/

Code:

https://github.com/rossgoodwin/plotgen

https://github.com/rossgoodwin/ficgen

Classes

Comm Lab: Networked Media, Introduction to Computational Media

Comm Lab: Networked Media, Daniel Shiffman, Hub Uy, Introduction to Computational Media, Introduction to Physical Computing, Jeffrey Feddersen, Luke Kao, Mimi (Yue) Yin, Projects, Xi Liu

Missy

Luke Kao, Xi Liu, Hub Uy

Missy is a physical smart photo frame that reminds users to contact their loved ones in different cities.

http://missy.strikingly.com/

Description

{We want to tackle the communication problems between family members}

*/What problem are we solving? /*

Grow up in Asian family; we are not used to express love to our family member. Relationships between family members grow apart because of bad communications.

*/What is our solution/*

Reconcile the relationship of family members by hacking communication technology. The smart photo frame will remind user to call their loved ones by gradually opaque the photo using micro-controller and switchable Glass.

Classes

Comm Lab: Networked Media, Introduction to Computational Media, Introduction to Physical Computing

Comm Lab: Networked Media, Louis Minsky, Projects, Robyn Overstreet

StalkableMe

Louis Minsky

Use Instagram location data to determine significant places for the people you follow.

http://stalkable.me

Description

StalkableMe uses the Instagram API to allow its user to see significant locations in the lives of the people they follow. StalkableMe takes the location data from photos and videos uploaded to Instagram and uses a clustering algorithm to determine if there is one place that a user uploads more media from than anywhere else. If there is a significant location, StalkableMe displays that location on a map. The intention is to show people that even without uploading specific information, a determined person can still learn more than we may realize.

It should be run in Google Chrome.

Classes

Comm Lab: Networked Media