Pat Morita, RIP

DataViz - Conceptual Research

ok, so far:

- i've been digging into Lindenmeyer's "Algorithmic Beauty of Plants". The math's way over my head, but it looks like i'll be able to circle back and dig into it if decide L-systems are the way to go. i like the naturalistic tendencies of L-systems, it seems like they're gonna be intuitive to read as graphics, but i'm a little worried that they're more suited towards taking small bits of data and exploding them, rather than taking larger data sets. maybe i should be thinking in terms of forests rather than individual plants? let each data point seed an L-Systems tree?

- poked around looking at some max objects that might be useful. i think this may be a distraction; first i need to dig deeper into jit.linden

made a to-do list

- skim Algo Beauty of Plants, see if there's anything useful in there
- play w jit.linden
- check out nowack's wiki, see if there's anything useful there
- sit down w a sketchbook and try to frame the contours of what i'm trying to do

LISTENING TO: modern lovers, orange juice, patti smith

Final Project: L-Systems and Data Representation

My final project will be for the benefit of an internship I’m doing with the Opportunity Agenda (OA), a progressive thinktank that’s in the process of launching their organization. They’re involved in presenting research to advocates, journalists, pundits, and the general public which reflects the state of opportunity in America. One area of particular interest involves dealing with these large amounts of government census data and mapping it in ways that are interesting and engaging. I’d like to design a method to graph this data using algorithms found in nature, hopefully creating a graphing method which is intuitively grasped and can describe and compare large datasets. The thought is to research a species of L-System or another algorithmic model found in nature and use the datasets as seeds from which the graphical representation will arise. I’ll implement the project in MaxMSP, with the eventual goal of porting it over to Flash for use on the OA website. Ultimately, I’d love to see this evolve into a tool with which visitors to the website can analyze their own datasets.

The first steps:
1) investigate jit.linden related algorithmic objects (eg, jit.conway)
2) dive into Lindenbayer's book The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants
3) start playing with the numbers and figuring out how, exactly, the graphics are going to work; mock it up in pseudo-code
4) pick the brain of Luke DuBois (who wrote his dissertation on L-systems) once i have some concrete questions

Midterm Consplosion!

I've learned a ton in the process of doing this midterm, but ultimately, i'm not happy with it. Not happy at all. I tried to build my own motion tracker from scratch, using the changes in px values to create an alpha mask that would let me put effects into the static portions of an image while letting the moving portions of an image come through whole. Its not working. I'm at a loss. This sucks.