"What does a baby computer call its father?"
"Data."
Her, Spike Jonze
- This workshop will be taught by Thibaut Evrard and Franc Camps-Febrer at the RCA on March 1st, 2017.
- The workshop is framed within the Desense elective, run by John Fass and Matt Lewis, which is part of the IED Master at the Royal College of Art (London).
- The workshop is provided as is, with no guarantees of epiphanies or life-changing experiences, but a positive hope of being helpful.
In this workshop we will learn how to use data to express, analyze and create. We will go through some of the most common data formats and we will review a couple of easy ways of obtaining and working with data.
Data art, visualization or sonification are forms of translation and mapping from data onto perceptual experiences that may provide different channels to incorporate sensory and intellectual information in our models.
How do you go from this...
{
"coord": {
"lon": 2.13,
"lat": 41.4
},
"temp": 16.5,
"pressure": 1018,
"humidity": 45,
"visibility": 10000,
"wind": {
"speed": 2.1,
"deg": 230
},
"id": 6356055,
"name": "Barcelona"
}
...to this?
A list of examples:
- We feel fine - Jonathan Harris
- Dear Data - Stephanie Posavec, Giorgia Lupi
- SoundSculpture - onformative
- Ishac Bertran - Searches
- Joy Division, Peter Saville
- Everyone Ever in the world - Peter Crnokrak
- Maral Pourkazemi
- Miles Davis' Legacy - Polygraph
- Out of Sight, Out of Mind - Pitch Interactive
- Wind Map - PointB
- Meshu
- Just Landed -
- MTA.me - Alexander Cheng
- Nicolas Feltron
- p5, Patterned By Nature, Data Chandelier - Lauren McCarthy
- Meshu - Rachel Binx
- Histography
- Quotidian Record - Brian House
Let's talk about data formats: JSON, CSV, XML, XLS
JSON
{
"coord": {
"lon": 2.13,
"lat": 41.4
},
"temp": 16.5,
"pressure": 1018,
"humidity": 45,
"visibility": 10000,
"wind": {
"speed": 2.1,
"deg": 230
},
"id": 6356055,
"name": "Barcelona"
}
CSV
"KpiId","KpiName","Value","Period","CollectionFrequency"
"CJGE32","Business","127","2014/2015_Apr","23", "Something"
"CJGE32","Business","235","2014/2015_May","23", "Something"
"CJGE32","Business","324","2014/2015_Jun","23", "Something"
"CJGE32","Business","431","2014/2015_Jul","23", "Something"
XML
<note>
<to>Tove</to>
<from>Jani</from>
<heading>Reminder</heading>
<body>Don't forget me this weekend!</body>
</note>
Tutorial: We will use a prepackaged JSON file and play around with it using p5.
In very abstract and simplified terms, an API is a set of tools that an application provides in order to interact with it programmatically, that is, using code. In our context, we will usually understand it as a web API, which tends to refer to a set of URLs that web application provides so that we can get some data from it or post some data onto the application.
The API of Youtube will allow to get information from Youtube's search results that would usually be relatively difficult to get from its interface, such as the most viewed videos in a certain radius, which will be the topic of our second exercise.
Another example for API use are Twitter bots, applications that POST to Twitter automatically given a set of conditions, such as Two Headlines, Every Color or NYPD edits.
Examples can be found here:
We will be using live API data to visualize / sonify / texify it and play around.
Go to Exercise 2.
The Open Knowledge International defines open data as:
“Open means anyone can freely access, use, modify, and share for any purpose (subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness).”
This means open data must be free to use, must have minimized its barriers of access and free to re-use and redistribute. It is a very large and important topic in the current state of our society, and the precise definition of it has enormous legal, political and cultural implications.
For a longer, more detail and precise explanation that I will ever be able to give, see the Open Data Handbook edited by the Open Knowledge Foundation and the World Bank.
Open Data repositories examples:
Extra: here is an interesting article about standarizing a definition of open based on a scale from 0 to 5, by the founder of The Office for Creative Research in NYC.
Editors
- Atom is a powerful editor for any programming language you would like to use, and very easily integrated with Github (it is also developed by them).
- Sublime is another great editor, for free.
- p5 has an editor but is deprecated, meaning it is no longer supported. You can use it in the meantime as a testing tool, and it is useful to simply try things out, but make no long-term plans with it.
Visual tools and libraries
- p5 is an implementation of Processing as a javascript library, so that you can code processing sketches and display on the web.
- Processing You know this.
- openFrameworks is a set of tools and libraries written in C++ designed for creative coding. It can be a daunting in the beginning but it is extremely powerful and widely used.
- d3 is a library for data manipulation and visualization in the web, using SVG and javascript.
- Paper.js is another visual library for javascript, fairly simple although not so popular.
- THREE.js is a 3D rendering library for javascript, based on WebGL. You can do some really crazy stuff with it.
Other tools
- POSTMAN is a tool for testing API calls.
Learning resources
- Introduction to Data Visualization - UC Berkeley is a wonderful resource for data visualization, focusing on the analytical and rational part, more than the expressive one, but if you're into that, it's highly recommended.