As you’ll recall from your readings in Interaction I, Lev Manovich talks about “mapping” as an essential component of data art. In this project, you’ll create your own interactive data mapping work. While the visual specifics of that mapping is up to you, at least one of your data sources must come live from the Internet. You could draw on an RSS feed from a website, scraping the data you need from the XML you receive. You could search the HTML to quantify something about its code. Whatever method you choose, it should reveal something compelling about the data.
We’ll use the Temboo Processing library to facilitate these data connections. You’ll be able to use simple GET methods to grab RSS XML data or HTML source. You also have available to you all of the other specialized Temboo connectors for sources like Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, and more. (Note that these special connectors will often require authentication API keys—we’ll talk about this).
Finally, you’ll need to do some time management to facilitate periodic querying of the data and mappings over time. I’ll demonstrate a simple method for this, and you may also want to look at Shiffman’s Timer Class.
Watch:
Jer Thorp on big data
Essential Functions and Libraries:
Temboo
HTTP Get
timers
Examples (all require Temboo credentials):
Simple Timer Visualizer
NY Times Gender Comparator
It/The HTML Comparison
Readings:
Shiffman: 325-355
Reas: 111-116, 327-332, 563-577,
Timeline:
2 weeks