Not today Justin

★
i don't do bad sauce passes
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
will byers stan first human second
art blog(derogatory)
trying on a metaphor
NASA
Xuebing Du
hello vonnie
todays bird

Andulka
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Stranger Things
Jules of Nature
tumblr dot com

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
No title available
cherry valley forever
RMH

seen from Saudi Arabia
seen from Argentina
seen from Netherlands
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from T1
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Canada
seen from Australia
seen from Austria

seen from United States
@louiegeetoo
Photofo: The Making of an Infographic
Herein you will learn of Photofo, the "simple" computer program I wrote to help me to collect the data that went into the infographic "a picture about pictures". My goal was to look at all of the photos I took while studying abroad in London last fall (of which there were over 2,000) and use the information I could glean (1) by looking at the photos and (2) by remembering what was going on at the time the photo was taken in order to learn a bit more about the places I visited--and about myself.
In order to make the task of collecting that data realistic, I decided to harness the Visual Basic programming skills I was just learning at the time to create what I eventually dubbed "Photofo" ("photo" + "info"). Here's a snippet of the code in Visual Basic Studio 2008:
And here's the finished product:
It's not much to look at, I'll admit. But when combined with some basic spreadsheets with EXIF data (data encoded in the pictures by my camera) pre-extracted thanks to Exifer, it became a full-blown photofo-ing tool. It worked like this:
I'd click Open Data and choose the correct barebones spreadsheet for the folder of photo I wanted to examine.
I'd click Choose Photo and pick a photo, either the first one in that folder or where I'd left off.
I'd get the following view, with the greyed-out values on the left being the ones pre-extracted by Exifer and added manually to the barebones data files by me:
(That was our tour bus during my first trip to Scotland, with Haggis Adventures. I highly recommend them, clever bus text or not.)
I'd then fill in all the info on the right, based on what I saw in the photo and (in the case of properties like "Spontaneous" and "Tourism") what I remembered.
I'd click Next Photo, the next image in the folder would load, and the process would repeat. I did this for every single one of my 2,143 photos in 18 folders. It took a reeeaaaally long time.
When I was done with that folder, I'd click Save Data to File and then move on to the next one.
Eventually I came out with a fully-filled-out spreadsheet for each of the folders full of photos I has. When I was done with them all, I combined them all into one big spreadsheet, which you can see a snippet of here:
In that spreadsheet, I used some Excel wizardry (thank you Google search) to quantify the data, as you can see in the rightmost columns. Then I used Excel to make charts and graphs out of the data, some of which went directly into the infographic. The rest I used as reference as I made the infographic.
And that was that (it looks like a lot less work in a blog post than it really was). It was a fun project, except for the part where I didn't leave myself quite enough time to work through the photos at a reasonable pace (let's just say it was my most hectic finals week ever).
The question is, where does Photofo go from here? Was it just a fun little personal project, or should I expand on and polish it for others to use? Good question. What do you think? Would you use it?
The history, design, social rhetoric, and future of the old Erie Canal aqueduct and current Broad Street road bridge in Rochester, NY. Presented at St. John Fisher College in December 2010. A Pecha Kucha is a presentation that requires the presenter to limit himself to 20 slides at 20 seconds each. It was invented by Japanese architects but has been used by many people the world over to talk about about a wide variety of topics since.
Learn more about the aqueduct's future at BroadStreetCorridor.com.
Photo credits:
Modern-day pictures
taken by John Pray (me) and my good friend Joe Caruso (used with permission).
Cover slide photo borrowed from Wikipedia.
Historical pictures borrowed from
“The End of the Line: Rochester’s Subway”, a documentary by Animatus Studios,
the Monroe Country Library System,
ErieCanal.org,
and MichiganRailroads.com (the train).
Future plan pictures
found on BroadStreetCorridor.com.
Net Neutrality: What It Is and Why You Should Care (or "Saving the Internet: Why and How")
One of the most important debates going on in our world today is the one over whether to preserve Net Neutrality. Sadly but unsurprisingly, you probably don’t even know what Net Neutrality is or what the debate’s results will affect. This is because those who have the most to gain by letting this issue pass by without debate are the same people and companies who control the flow of information to you, through TV, newspapers, radio, and popular web sites. It’s a trivial matter for them to keep their TV and radio stations from broadcasting any information that they don’t want broadcasted. Now they want to have such restrictive control over the Internet, too. This is what the Net Neutrality debate is about.
•
Net neutrality is the idea that all online content should be treated indiscriminately. A neutral or open Internet is the only type we've had so far, where all websites--commercial or non-commercial, corporate or ad-free, established or up-and-coming--load at the same (relative) speed, and each user, after paying their ISP a flat fee, receives an all-access pass to digital content. An open Internet ensures a level playing field for online entrepreneurs and users alike.
The above concise definition is quoted from this article by Melissa Bollman of The Humanist. She goes on to discuss the current threat to Net Neutrality, as posed by big corporations who have much to gain monetarily by introducing discrimination to the 'net. This threat is a serious one, and one that we must all be aware of for the sake of the future of our Internet.
••
The people who started the “Save the Internet” campaign recognized the dangers of ignoring this threat despite the service providers’ efforts to hide it from view. They have worked for years now to attempt to alert the public—that is, you and me—of these companies’ intentions to bastardize the Internet for their own short-term profit. In a nutshell, Internet service providers like Time Warner and Verizon want to charge content-creators extra money to be distributed to users at the normal speed; otherwise, those creators’ content will load more slowly or not at all. That practice will apply to everything from Google and Facebook to your mother’s blog or your friend’s small business website. It will be (and in some cases, already is) a restrictive and discriminatory practice, but it’s currently legal. Here’s Save the Internet’s 2007 video summing up the situation:
•••
Brothers Hank and John Green (an eco-technology blogger and award-winning young adult author, respectively) in 2007 decided to use the Internet to reboot their own suffering brotherly relationship. Living hundreds of miles apart (in Montana and New York City, respectively), they felt they did not talk to each other enough. Their solution: to ban themselves from communicating with each other by text for an entire year, instead talking only by voice (over the phone) and (more significantly) by video blog. The “Vlogbrothers” started a channel on YouTube, each brother taking a turn every other weekday in 2007 making a video of himself talking to his sibling about a topic of his choosing.
Though the “Brotherhood 2.0” project started just between the two of them, the two brothers left the YouTube channel open for public view and quickly gained a loyal fan following. The message they ended up conveying, just through their conversations to one another, was that it is okay to be a “nerd”—that is, it’s okay to be enthusiastic, to be an expert, to care, and to be ready and willing to share your knowledge. This accidental movement (eventually dubbed “Nerdfighters”, "nerds who fight for awesome") went against a dominant culture of “coolness”, of not caring, of leaving the thinking to others. It provided an outlet and a community to turn to for similarly-minded viewers worldwide. This community continues to thrive and grow today, and I’m proud to count myself among its members.
John and Hank have continued making videos since that first year, now just two or three a week (rather than every weekday). You're about to watch a video from May 2010 in which Hank (after discussing the brothers’ Dad’s recent birthday) gives his own explanation of Net Neutrality—a principle that without which Brotherhood 2.0 wouldn’t have been possible and the Nerdfighter community would never have come to exist (and would probably cease to exist, if the principle were to be quashed):
Next is a video from John the previous month, in which we see a glimpse of some Nerdfighters and get a nerdy-but-informative explanation of a then-current issue typical of the older brother:
This video also demonstrates another important aspect of an open Internet: the ability of any citizen to make his or her voice heard on political issues, whether he has a lot of money or power or not (something that is not possible on our sadly non-open newspapers, magazines, radio, and television). Instead of having to trust the government or the advertiser-controlled news networks to give us the full story, we have other options to turn to if we choose. And that is what freedom of press is really supposed to be all about.
••••
Let’s say you have a great idea for the next big website. Let’s say you’re like Mark Zuckerberg, who took his ideas for an online social network and harnessed the power of the open Internet to turn those ideas into a real, useful, valuable creations. All he needed was some programming knowledge and an extra computer to serve as a web server (which a friend lent him the money for). (Even less is needed today to start a full-fledged website.) He didn't need to ask anyone's permission. He didn't need to pay his Internet service provider extra to distribute his content at a reasonable speed. He just needed an idea, some knowhow, and the open Internet. Services like Facebook and Wikipedia are used by millions of us every day, and yet they were started not by engineers at big companies but by individuals with nothing but their personal computers and Internet access. This is the power of the open Internet, of Net Neutrality.
Wikipedia, as you know, is a huge online encyclopedia of every kind of information imaginable, with every page editable by readers (in other words, the site's audience are also its creators--something that was very rare before our open Internet came along). Wikipedia's role in today's information-driven societies is large; its influence is so large, in fact, that teachers and professors often need to specifically ban their students from using the site as an academic source (since the students, so used to going to Wikipedia for their information, find it unusual to imagine getting info from anywhere else).
Wikipedia's history is interesting, and another example of a project that would not be possible without a net-neutral Internet. Click the logo below and read Wikipedia's article on itself. Besides giving a thorough description of the site and its history, it serves as an example of what services like Wikipedia have to offer to their users:
Now imagine a world without Wikipedia.
•••••
The World Wide Web itself, the open platform which uses the Internet to provide a place for anyone who desires to post pages full of content and to view the content posted by others, was similarly started by an individual sitting at his computer and thinking about what he could do with the global network forming around him. Tim Berners-Lee saw the incredible value of such a universal, open Internet back in 1990 when he created the first website and web browser, and fears a day when that network is no longer open nor universal. In an article published just this past month, he gives his own wise thoughts on the Net Neutrality debate, and reminds us all of how and why the Web began:
••••••
As a technology geek and aspiring programmer, I pay close attention to the many useful bits of new hardware and software made available to us every day. I find it particularly amazing how many excellent, useful apps--both for our computers and for our smartphones--are being released on a daily basis, many for free! And those that aren't free are usually only a few dollars, far less than those big corporations would want to charge you for the same product, to be sure. Dropbox, for example, is an incredibly useful syncing service that lets anyone keep a folder full of files totally up to date on every computer or Internet-connected device they use. The difference Dropbox has made in the lives of so many people who make their living creating content on computers (myself included) is unquantifiably large, and yet the service isn't provided by any big, established company. And Dropbox is free unless you want to choose to pay for more than 2GB of storage space--an option that wouldn't be possible if Dropbox's developers had to pay Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, and Time Warner each to get the "premium" content delivery speed for their users nationwide (let alone worldwide). But this is exactly what those providers want to do, and not because they can't afford to keep things going the way they are now. It's simply, and sadly, a ploy to increase their already large profit. For some perspective, read the following Reuters article (click the Comcast logo), which describes Comcast's ridiculously large profit in just the last quarter of 2009 (hint: it was almost a billion dollars--and that's just for three months of the year! There's no hurting going on in Comcast's bank accounts, or those of its executives.)
•••••••
We all know what YouTube is and use it regularly, despite the fact that it has existed for less than four years. Yes, YouTube is another example of the open Internet fostering innovation and improvement to our lives. But more importantly, YouTube, like the World Wide Web as a whole, provides a platform for users of the Internet everywhere to make their voices—and, in some cases, their instruments—heard.
Independent musicians for years have been restricted from sharing their music with potential fans thanks to the restrictive, discriminatory nature of record companies’ usual practices (not unlike their fellow media giants—many of whom now actually own the record companies). Internet-based tools like YouTube allow musicians to bypass this old, restrictive system altogether, distributing their music easily, freely, and independently. Hank Green is one such musician (besides showering clothed on video, he also writes and sings nerdy songs). Another is Lauren O’Connell, a Fairport, NY native. This 21-year-old has no big record deals, no recording studio, no friends in high places. And yet she has three albums out on iTunes and elsewhere, a popular YouTube channel, and thousands of fans all over the world. She grew up with my girlfriend in Fairport, but I think I would have encountered her music anyway thanks to her popularity on YouTube (her videos have been featured on the front page multiple times). She’s an inspiration for aspiring independent musicians (or artists, or writers, or programmers, or interpretive dancers) everywhere.
Here Lauren is singing a song she also wrote. I don't know what your taste in music is like, but by my judgement, it's excellent stuff. Note that she’s in her living room, not some fancy company-owned studio. And yet this one video has over 625,000 full views:
If Net Neutrality is extinguished, our next Lauren O’Connells, Hank Greens, Mark Zuckerbergs, and Tim Burners-Lees will be extinguished, too, before they even have a chance to ignite. The next Facebook or Dropbox or YouTube will try to start but will be choked out by the service providers like Comcast so that they can promote their own products, and the products of those who can afford their high fees, instead.
••••••••
So, how do we, as individuals, help to ensure our futures by keeping Net Neutrality around? It’s simple: we just have to make noise. Our still-mostly-functional democratic system will take care of the rest, as long as the volume of the noise we make is great enough. A few weeks ago, a hearing on Net Neutrality was held in New Mexico. More than 400 people turned up, and many of them shared their thoughts on Net Neutrality in the form of personal stories and poetry.
Also attending was Michael Copps, one of the five commissioners of the FCC (which, if you don’t know, is the governmental agency in charge of regulating and preserving open telecommunications in the US). Copps listened to his fellow citizens, and spoke himself, affirming his personal commitment to Net Neutrality (click the image for a description of his speech):
The event in New Mexico is only one of many events and rallies being organized all over the world by ordinary people like you and me who care about the future of our Internet. You don't have to write poems and go to rallies to show your support, though. The open Internet itself makes it possible for us to make our voices heard, right now, about this issue and any other one we care about.
•••••••••
The decision-makers are listening, and Comcast's well-paid lobbyists won't quit whispering in their ears anytime soon. If enough of us speak, loudly and often enough, we will be heard by those whose job is to make decisions based on what we, the people, say.
The above Internet celebrities earned that title from their fans and not from media companies who served to profit from them (I'm looking at you, Justin Bieber). If, like those in the video, you care about the future of our Internet, take advantage of tools setup by your fellow citizens to contact the government officials who will soon be making these decisions (as soon as December, the rumors say):
Our society has improved so much since the introduction of the Internet. The future of that same Internet depends on you. Make your noise.
Just after I finished this piece, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced a proposed plan supposedly supporting Net Neutrality. Free Press calls this effort "fake", and I tend to agree. The plan makes no real strides toward protecting any of the most important principles of the open Internet. Fortunately, only if three of the five commissioners of the FCC vote for the plan will it be put into action. Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Michael Copps, the latter of whom appears above, have in the past shown their commitment to the rights of the people, so hope is not lost. Take a look at what I have to say below about the importance of the open Internet, and decide for yourself whether you think it's important to let the FCC and Congress know your own thoughts on this crucial issue.
I originally wrote the above as an "anthology" for an English class assignment, but all along I had in mind the intention to crosspost it here. Everything in it represents my honest opinions, and I don't exaggerate the importance of the issue of Net Neutrality. Every day I am finding more examples of what the Open Internet makes possible that I wish I had included here. But then I remember: As long as the Internet remains open, people will continue to make awesome things every day for all of us to immediately enjoy. I'd sure hate to lose that.
I just realized that the excellent graphic novel my girlfriend gave me to read over Thanksgiving is by the same graphic novelist my class is going to see tomorrow at RIT. Best. Coincidence. Ever! (It's Alison Bechdel, by the way.) I knew those two pages looked familiar!: http://www.cwgp.org/alison_bechdel.php
Work-in-progress screenshot of my Self Photo Info Gathering Tool (Photofo). There will be a separate window that shows the photo being categorized at the moment. Clicking "Next" or "Previous" will save my choices and the info gathered from the photo file itself (like filename, date taken, and whether flash was used, which my camera saved in the picture itself) in a simple database, and then will move on to the next (or previous) photo to be 'fo'd.
(It only looks like a Mac OS X program because I happened to be in my school's Mac Lab when taking the screenshot. When I'm using it on my own PC, it will have the Windows 7 Aero look.)
Using Java in Eclipse with WindowBuilder Pro.
Photofographic: Abroad Edition Mockup
Ideally, the infographic depicting the categorization of my semester abroad photos will be interactive. The "home" screen, as I imagine it right now, will be a map. Mousing over the different parts of the map (country or city) will pop up some quick info on that group of photos; clicking it will bring you to a much more detailed view. At this detailed view you'll be able to look specifically at the information you want, and (hopefully) also be able to look at a gallery of the photos that fit into the specifications you chose.
This is all to come, however. Right now I'm still working on the data collection part of the project. I'm working steadily toward having a working program coded that will let me easily tag my photos one by one with all of the info I want to gather. I;m going to call it Photofo (as in Photo Info); who knows: maybe its usefulness will go beyond this project.
Exploring the History of Rochester's Abandoned Subway
This post is one in a series done for a class I took as a senior in college on the interesting topic of visual rhetoric.
I've lived near Rochester my entire life (about 40 minutes away by car), and yet I know so little about its history. What I do know about the city's history can be summed up in a small bulleted list:
Back in good ol' colonial times, Palmyra (my small, quiet hometown) was a bigger, more bustling city than Rochester was at the time
Kodak and Xerox made Rochester a boomtown and brought many, many businesses and people to the city and the surrounding region
When Kodak and Xerox made a turn for the worse, so did Rochester. None of them have recovered.
... That's it.
I have a feeling that dearth of knowledge is about to change. In the small amount of research about the abandoned tunnel that I've already done, here's what I've learned:
The Erie Canal used to run through this tunnel. Eventually it was diverted to go around the city instead of through it.
In the 1920s, the former city canalway was adapted to serve as a new subway tunnel. This rail system ran until the late 1950s.
The tunnel has been abandoned since. The specific part that I'm looking at, over the Genesee River and under the library, has been considered to be turned into a tourist attraction, a footbridge with a Rochester Transportation Museum (according to Wikipedia).
However, the city doesn't really think it has the money for this kind of thing. Instead it wants to fill it in with dirt because, as it is now, it supposedly takes over $1 million per year to keep the tunnel maintained (that is, from caving in).
Now this is key: When the city announced this plan, there was a loud public outcry. The subway tunnel is an important part of Rochester's history and identity, the protesters argued. Despite the current "uselessness" of the tunnel, no one really wants it gone (besides the city government's book-balancers).
That is to say, the abandoned tunnel is an important part of Rochesterians' cultural identity, and they seek to preserve it so as to preserve that identity.
I hope to better understand this identity as I get deeper into this project. I've got a DVD documentary about the Rochester subway coming through interlibrary loan. (This documentary was apparently made by Rochester's own Animatus Studios, where I took animation classes when I was very young--but that's a story for another time.) And I've found more material to read about the tunnel and the canal, so that'll be good. And, of course, I'll be visiting the tunnel again. Maybe we'll run into some homeless Rochesterians this time.
Photo from here.
Rochester: A City of Rhetoric
This post is one in a series done for a class I took as a senior in college on the interesting topic of visual rhetoric.
Work on my abroad photo stats infographic is well underway (or at least work on the program I'm writing to collect that data -- more on that soon!). In the meantime, we've got another assignment.
Entitled "The City of Rhetoric", this assignment asks to analyze some place in or around our city of Rochester, NY in terms of the rhetoric that went into and that results from its design.
This analysis will culminate in a Pecha Kucha, which is a type of presentation of Japanese origin that requires the speaker to only use exactly 20 slides shown for exactly 20 seconds
along with whatever audio counterpart the speaker deems appropriate, be it the speaker's voice, music, miscellaneous sounds, or (most likely) some combination of the three. I think the Pecha Kucha (Japanese for "chit chat") a very cool idea. One thing I really enjoy is working within limits--often a limit in choice in some aspects really brings out the creativity in others.
The most immediate question for me is, what place do I choose? My instinctual choice would be the St. John Fisher College campus, perhaps specifically its little-known nooks and crannies, which I know well after attending and working at the school for nearly three-and-a-half straight years.
(Bonus: Lavery Library's old front facade, which we'll never see again.)
It'd be very interesting to me (and I think to everyone in the class, as members of the Fisher community) to gain some better insight into the kind of rhetorical effects that the design of the different bits of our campus has on us. But our professor was very specific about our chosen spot being off-campus. Perhaps I can still convince him otherwise.
I probably won't bother, though, thanks to my other idea (which just came to me, to be honest). Rochester contains a space that I only discovered very recently, thanks to my friends.
This abandoned aqueduct/subway tunnel in the middle of downtown, spanning the Genesee River and extending under the city's public library, is infinitely interesting to me. This theoretically-off-limits place is in fact my favorite landmark in the city proper (which admittedly I'm only cursorily familiar with), and it's thrilling to me that such an accidental, unofficial spot is so important to the city's identity (at least from my perspective).
My one friend is doing a photography independent study focused on Rochester. As his flickr photostream reveals, he's visited a lot of landmarks in and around the city, from Mount Hope Cemetery to Seabreeze amusement park. He also visited the abandoned aqueduct, and later took a bunch of us there when, feeling bored and spontaneous, we found ourselves dumped downtown by an RTS bus (thanks to the rarely-taken-advantage-of free bus passes provided by Fisher).
Climbing down inside
(which is not an activity for the physically-unfit), we found this:
a world of graffiti,
pitch darkness, and
mounds of rubble and dirt.
It may not seem like much, but I assure you that it was very exciting to me. Adventurous and rebellious individuals and groups venture down here relatively often, and so it is a place where rhetoric has a role. I'm excited to explore what that role is.
All pictures in this post after the first two were taken by me. The skyline photo comes from Wikipedia, while the Pecha Kucha slide comes from this blog.
VR 10/21: Likely Types of Conceptual Representation in my Abroad Photo Infographic
This post is one in a series done for a class I took as a senior in college on the interesting topic of visual rhetoric.
So I'm planning to meticulously analyze the approximately 2,039 photos and videos I took during my semester abroad, looking at everything from where the picture was taken to who/what is in it, whether it is a "repeat" picture (one I took again, usually in case the first wasn't quite how I wanted it to be), and whether it is a close-up or far-away shot. (The actual list of attributes to be examined is far from final.)
The question is, once I have all of this information, how am I going to visualize it? That is, how am I going to put it into picture form, in some form that allows a viewer to easily comprehend the information in context with and relation to all of the other information represented? Good question.
Our textbook for our Visual Rhetoric class, Reading Images, spends a chapter discussing the different types of "conceptual representation" (as opposed to narrative representation) used in visualizations. I specifically found relevant the "symbolic process", which is basically defined as representing what a subject "means or is". The book uses an old painting of a man sitting in his study surrounded by objects that clearly represent some part of that man's identity. A similar example pulled from my own Facebook profile pictures album can be found below this paragraph. The point of the objects in the image is not to illustrate the objects themselves, but for them to represent something else--in this case some part of my own self/identity.
The PS3 controller represents my affinity for video games, for example, while the moisturizer is meant to convey that my hands tend to get very dry in the winter (though I see now that there are other possible interpretations. Anyway...).
Alright, so I understand symbolic processes. How does this concept apply to my project? Well, let's specifically take one aspect I plan on analyzing in my photos: what the subject of the photo is: person, animal, building, interior, or landscape, and so on (deciding on these final lists will definitely take some thought and revising). I'm hoping that this project will help me to better understand some aspect of myself; specifically, in this example, the kinds of things I tend to focus on, that I tend to think significant enough to devote photographs to while not bothering to snap pics of others.
So let's say I represent these subjects as silhouettes: a person standing, a bird, a famous building/landmark (Big Ben, perhaps), a mountain (for landscapes). I'll then resize each of these objects in relation to each other depending on what proportion of my photos actually had those objects as its subjects. Ideally, this series of silhouettes, which on their own are essentially pointless pictures, will serve as symbols of my observational tendencies--an abstract concept that is really impossible to represent except by some technique like symbolism.
Did a quick (half hour or so) spreadsheet quantifying how many pictures I took in various places while studying abroad in London last fall. (All photos and videos I took during that time and haven't since deleted are included.)
Still not sure if I'm going to pursue this for my infographic, but it is certainly a possibility. It's interesting to see just how many pictures I took--more than 2000 total, with 347 in Paris alone despite only spending a weekend there! (I actually took two separate trips to Scotland; unsure how that will factor into my final visualization, but it probably will in some way. I'm also probably going to break down large groups like London and Paris into smaller categories, such as specific neighborhoods.)
Update: I've decided I'd also like to examine things like what the subject of the photos are (person? landmark? landscape? animal? object?), whether the photo is portrait or landscape, what the weather was at the time (indoors, sunny, rainy, snowy?), in what context the picture was taken (tourism? daily life? in transit?), time of day, and other details that aren't so easy to measure at a glance.
This means I'll have to go through each photo pretty much one-by-one and record all of the criteria I want to measure, but I think it'll be worth it. I think I'll learn a lot about what my experience was really like, what my photo-taking habits are like, and through that what kinds of things I tend to focus on when observing.
This post is one in a series done for a class I took as a senior in college on the interesting topic of visual rhetoric.
A Self-Quantification Brainstorm
This post is one in a series done for a class I took as a senior in college on the interesting topic of visual rhetoric.
We are currently working on a project that involves collecting data about ourselves (any kind of data we want) and then creating an infovis or infographic to effectively illustrate that data.
Here are a few potential data types that I might collect and illustrate about myself, and how:
Photographs, how many taken, where, when, how - measured through photo organization software Picasa - could be particularly interesting thanks to my semester abroad last year
Cartoons/comics - subject matter, techniques used (physical), techniques used (visual rhetoric) - manually analyze the comics I've drawn in the last few years, or maybe just specifically Skip & Cal or editorial cartoons
Computers I've Fixed - how many, for whom, whether I got paid and how much - this is not realistic for a short term project, since I haven't kept track of any of this info up to now. Interesting potential though.
Video games I own or that I've played - how many, for how long each, which ones, for which systems - Wii and Steam (PC) keep track of your playing time. Also maybe analysis of stats within a particular game, such as the multiplayer Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which keeps meticulous records of everything that happens in the game, down to individual players (as long as names have been picked when playing)
How much time / how many messages I spend in communication with others, as well as when and maybe even about what (personal vs work, etc) - start recording cell phone records, consider Facebook? IM records?
VR 10/5: Examples of Types of Narrative Visual Structure
This post is one in a series done for a class I took as a senior in college on the interesting topic of visual rhetoric.
Action: Non-Transactional:
Circumstances:
Reactional:
Our mission in creating these images was, as the assignment asked us to do, to create mash-ups of found images that can serve as examples of some of the different types of narrative visual structures.
Starting out with absolutely no ideas as to subject matter, we made use of StumbleUpon to provide us with some inspiration by randomly sending us around the Internet. Each of the above pictures started from some image we found through StumbleUpon, mashed up with further elements extracted from specific Google Image searches. For example, StumbleUpon presented us with a page full of artwork of comic book hero Wolverine; we took one such piece of artwork, and set it against the very-opposite environment of Teletubby Land (with its infamous sun-baby), which we specifically searched for.
Britney and I worked together in Stumbling and determining which of our discoveries would and wouldn't fit our needs. We also worked together in determining what additional images to mash together into the ones we had found. Due to my higher level of Photoshop (well, really GIMP) experience, I did the editing; Britney gave valuable input throughout the editing process.
We paired Wolverine and Ghost Rider with Teletubby Land because, honestly, we thought the juxtaposition of opposites would be humorous. We really liked the picture of the man and the cliff, and added the sailboats to make the picture more of an example of circumstances, with multiple actors that are present but not interacting. We came across the picture of the cookies and thought it was really entertaining, and so we found a kitchen counter and cookie sheet to place them on.
We actually finished this project pretty quickly, which I think is a great example of the power of the technology at our disposal, especially the Internet. Without StumbleUpon, inspiration would have been much harder to come across. Without Google, finding specific pictures would have been nearly-impossible, necessitating us to make such pictures from scratch ourselves. I'd go on, but you get the idea.
This project was fun. I'd do one like it again.
VR 9/28: Image Analysis
This post is one in a series done for a class I took as a senior in college on the interesting topic of visual rhetoric.
Your eye is first drawn to the "BOOM" and then to the giant lightning bolt, which you then follow down to the bottom-left corner.
The main "actor" in this image, by Kress and van Leeuwen's definition, is the lightning bolt. Its vector leads toward the edge of the picture, away from the actual characters present. This helps to emphasize the main idea of the image (that an individual human being is--apparently, anyway--statistically unlikely to be hit by lightning).
One of the small human figures has what could be called a hiking stick. The other does not. The one with the stick, then, automatically carries the connotation of adventure, which supports and is supported by his dialogue, reckless in comparison to the nervous tones of his companion.
An aspect of many webcomics that I've always found interesting when comparing to their print counterparts is the inclusion of "hover text" or "mouseover text" -- that is, the "tool tip" that appears when you hover your mouse cursor over the image. This "secret" message sometimes contains some throwaway additional joke pertaining to the comic.
Sometimes it can completely change one's interpretation of the image in question.
So my question is, how does a previously nonexistent element like this affect our interpretation and analysis of an online image? Can we really classify pictures as being separate from their context? Is it even appropriate for me to have reposted the xkcd comic above without the frame of its original page (as can be reached by clicking on it)? Doesn't removing it from its visual (and technical? HTMLical? How do we classify mouseover text?) environment change its meaning?
It seems my rambling has deviated. Better end it. Enjoy those comics.