Class 05 – Feb 22 2016:
Projects in Social Visualization
Less coffee. Less firehose. More collaboration.
Some answers:
- You don't need to use D3 in your final projects. Your projects must be published online. They can also exist as posters.
- API anxiety: We will be working with a (relatively) small number of API's. We will build tools together to consume, store and pre-process API data.
- Your projects can be whimsical, or scholarly. But they must be polished, and something that you and
- Working with few constraints can make some people anxious. We will develop a 'unified' topic and dataset together in class. You are encouraged to think outside the box.
- Going forward classes are going to be more like a study group or workshop.
Rescheduled Presentations:
We need to reschedule all our presentations. New schedule:
- Feb 22: Lucy and Cara
- Feb 29: Lorzenzo and Sever
- Mar 14: June and Andrew
- Mar 28: Kimi and Jiani
- Apr 4: Jessie and Patric
- Mar 28: Ryan
Project dimensions and scope. Its OK to Dream, but constraints are good.
- Static vs Interactive
- Exploratory vs Narrative
- Anecdotal vs Scientific
- Historic vs Live
Working with data
- Collect Data (was: CSV files, or XML, now: JSON from an API)
- Combine data (merge multiple records into one)
- Add sentiment
- Add image tags
- Dig into responses, likes, retweets … &etc.
- Filter. Pluck. Summarize.
- Reshape. Make the data conform to your visualization needs.
- Display in a web browser.
Exciting Development: Images data:
We can use data from social media to tell us a story about any subject we find interesting. Examples:
- The spread of the Zika virus. Use geographic data over time to see if where in the world people are most concerned about Zika.
- The presidential primary races. Sentiment analysis, tweet frequency, and tweet reach as a proxy for candidates popularity. Does this match other polls?
Can we use data from social media to tell us a story about social media? Examples:
- Explore the factors that lead to tweets that generate the most impressions.
- Which images are the most retweeted by region?
- Who are the most followed personalities on twitter? How do their status updates differ (frequency, word-frequency, sentiment, media)? What time of the day do they tweet?
- What are the unique characteristics of social media?
- How do we think social media impacts:
- Communication / Community
- News
- Our physical presence
- Privacy and safety
- Law enforcement & Justice
- Power dynamics
- Characterize and differentiate these social communities:
- Facebook
- Instagram
- Snapchat
- Twitter
- Flickr
BREAK 7:00 - 7:10
Look at work
- Look at D3 visualization ps-03 assignments
- Look at final project sketches.
- How achievable?
- Existing related work?
- Whats interesting about it?
Presentations from Lucy
BREAK 8:00 - 8:10
Working & Questions
Get started on modifications to your project proposal.
Problem set 05:
Project Proposal. Bring in 1 or 2 project proposals for next week. The purpose of this proposal is to make us believe. It is acceptable at this phase to have large fake images (jpg?). Use 'click-handling' fakery to give us a sense of the UI if applicable.
Snow Day Slack Links:
Items from last week:
- I have started to archive posts containing certain twitter hash tags. If you have some tags you want me to start archiving from twitter, please let me know.
*You can work with data from flickr, instagram, twitter, or google+. I am currently only capturing tweets, but can add other services.
- Advanced: We can post-process social message data for example to extract sentiment.
- Read this recent paper by danah boyd. What World Are We Building? - danah has been researching online behavior and critiquing social media for more than 10 years. Her primary concern is about online youth, but her work is generally applicable.
- Lev Mannovich has been doing interesting experiments with large volumes of instagram images. See for example The Exceptional and the Everyday: 144 hours in Kyiv
- TODO: Help me review this big list of recommended journal articles on Big Data. A few papers and sections may be of interest, though I have not vetted any of them yet: http://www.cs.nyu.edu/faculty/davise/papers/BigDataBib.html
- Do some independent research when trying to identify a topic. It would be great to share in-process thoughts, or interesting papers / visualizations with the group in slack along the way. Here are some (half-baked) idea launch pads if you need some inspiration.
- Twitter Bots, especially bots that make images. ★
- SEO / Brand management, engagement, spam.
- Richard Price and the Suicide Grils
- [Images, privacy and the abuse(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/technology/personaltech/12basics.html?_r=0) of exif data.
- clickbait, A/B testing, the echo chamber and the decline of mainstream media.
- For-hire followers, paid engagement, cpc rates, and add bidding.
- The role of social media in political change.
- Hate speach and the attention marketplace. Trolls.
- Metrics of social influence, and the hyperconnected.
*Comparing trends between multiple social media outlets, and broadcast / mainstream media.
- Mapping social trends. (Note; generally most tweets don't contain lat / long data. Sometimes it can be extacted in other ways).
Git Help
If you are continually running into troubles with git, consider reviewing some of these: