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