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About: Assignment for Week 4 of Data Representation at ITP | NYU. “Pick one of your classmate’s CSV assignments from last week, and re-mix the final visualization. Instead of aiming for informational clarity, be experimental, and see how you can abstractly display the data that was the base of the original visualization”

Notes: I decided to experiment on Ara Cho’s project, which involved 100 years of UK temperature. She had a great chart, and I wanted to keep elements of that in my version. Since temperature is always fluctuating, I decided to also incorporate that into my piece. Finally, since we’ve been doing some animation in class, i wanted to integrate what I learned in class into this assignment.

• Information is part of the system and cannot be taken away from it
• System is not decomposable.
• “To speak of bulls…is not the same as to be in the bullring.”
• People understand what’s in their system.
• Describe as much as you want, people do not understand whats outside of their system.
• Order lets us understand.
• Why are things in order/sequence?
• Information takes “the path of least resistance”
• Information is “the link between what we know and what we know it with”.
• Limits are important.
• Information “was not seen as the path to anything”, while currently the more information we have, “the closer we must be getting to the ‘truth’ about this or that.”
• Certain people used to have power, now information itself has power.
• Information must be turned into meaning in order for the mind to understand.
• Systems are important too.

What is documentation:

• “A document is a proof in support of fact”
• An object must be cataloged before others can derive information from it.
• Need catalogues, of catalogues, to understand primary documentation.
• “Knowledge and studies, science and practice could not exist without the efficient exploration of documents and a rigorous organization of documentary work.”
• The Documentalist keeps track of documents that are about objects
• The more we know, the more documentation we need
• Human re-document in different languages
• There is an overwhelming amount of documentation compared to the earlier years
• Intellectual work, compared to previous years, has a different rhythm due to all the machines available for documentation.
• There is so much documentation that a Documentalist is needed to help the scientist sift through documents.
• Documenting is become more of a skill set.

About: Assignment for Week 4 of Data Representation at ITP | NYU. “Build out our We Feel Fine example so that pressing the ‘g’ key sorts the FeelingEntry objects depending on their reported gender.”

Notes:I decided to add some more ‘oomph’ by being able to separate by location. So pressing ‘t’ moves the ‘genderless’ objects to the top. Pressing ‘f’ moves the ’0′ to the left. Pressing ‘h’ moves the ’1′ to the right. Pressing ‘b’ moves all objects back to the middle. Pressing ‘g’ moves all objects to their respective section.

About: Assignment for Week 3 of Data Representation at ITP | NYU. “Let’s see what you can do with your newfound CSV skills. Pick a data set from the Guardian Data Store and create a simple, static visualization.”

I used the data set from the Guardian’s Datablog : University applications: which subject are up and down?

Notes:I decided to use OOP to better organize the data. I noticed that each subject more could be an object in an ArrayList, rather than having a huge array. This also allows me to remove objects later if needed to focus on certain major cores, like Languages, which contains a variety of majors.

Overall, seemed simple to follow and complete. My only issue was going from developing in Eclipse to Processing. Its also quite fascinating the whole issue with people picking a random number that contains a seven.

The usage of color is quite helpful, along with representing data in different forms; from numbers in grids to bar graphs. Each has their own unique strengths and weaknesses. In this scenario, the gridded color numbers was the best choice.

Code can be viewed here. NOTE: I removed my UN & PW for obvious reasons.