When I began this project I knew I wanted to build an interactive animation that changed based on an automated analysis of online user-generated text. Based on my previous animation experiments, I wanted the animation itself to be combination of traditional 2-d frame animation and composited photographs. I knew a little about developing web apps and natural language processing, but hoped the details of the project would develop as I learned more about the technology.

Because of the text analysis functionality, I decided that python was a good choice for a core language. Python also has a number of libraries that allow it to interface pretty easily with the Flickr api and Flickr  was where I had decided to pull images and text from.

I first experimented with Google App engine’s SDK for python, mainly because it was free. I was pleased with it at first, but soon became frustrated because I kept having to modify all of my python libraries to run correctly with the weird version of Python that app engine utilizes. I gave up and decided to build the back end of my site as a stand-alone install of Django on Apache with a PostgreSQL database. So far I’ve been really pleased with this choice. Aside from a bit of a hang-up in I encountered in efficiently serving static media, Django has really impressed me with its well-designed, easy to use data structure and accessible learning curve. (I know I’m late to the game in this regard, but I’ve already decided to run it as the back end for a number of my other projects after this one is wrapped up.)

In terms of hosting, for a while I was messing with Amazon’s EC2, but have since switched over to Webfaction. I think it was the right choice, as EC2 was a bit too barebones for someone with no experience in server administration. (I now know why sysadmins are so justifiably grumpy all of the time; their job is very, very difficult and they deserve far more appreciation than they receive.) I’m still using EC2 instances to run some topic modeling scripts real-quick-like, but all real-time processing functionality has been transferred to Webfaction. Once I was on Webfaction, it was a snap to install all of the natural language processing python libraries I needed (NLTK and Gensim) and their dependencies and get back to work.

Coming next, Part 2: Building an online animation engine wherein I sacrifice all developer cred and choose flash.

My collaborator Leslie and I just returned from the Communicating Forms conference at the University of Chicago where we presented our current project Narrative Atlas. Communicating Forms was my first experience at an art history and literature conference so I wasn’t sure what the reaction to our project would be, as it relied extensively on natural language processing to assist in readership of traditional literary texts. We received an amazing response from the rest of the conference however. It was great to see that people were open to the idea and interested in participating in later versions of the project. The fact that our project was referenced in multiple panels and lectures following our presentation was evidence to me of how much people were engaged with it. The multidisciplinary perspective of the conference was pretty eye-opening for me in terms of the feedback we received. Because we weren’t engaging in discussions with other programmers, I got a much better sense of the types of usability that the literary community was interested in for the project. Our discussions made it clear that we needed to focus on developing the online interface for the program as soon as possible. Now that we’re back, I’m ready to get into reworking the alpha of the program into something that we can release to a group of test users in the near future. More updates to come!

The first and second are the final piece and its installation in a public bus shelter. The third is the initial sketch I painted it from. The piece itself is 67 x 47 inches and was done in acrylics. I need to paint more. You can see all the other amazing work from the project here: http://www.publicadcampaign.com/tosat/

If you are not familiar with her work, check it out. It is well worth your time.

Ada Lovelace Day is an annual global celebration of women in technology and science. It is named after Ada Lovelace, who was arguably the world’s first computer programmer.  If you know of a woman working in this field  who you believe deserves recognition, (and I’m sure you do) write a blog post about her today!

Below are the paintings and drawings they completed during the lesson.. these kids are good:

Glasshouse opens this Thursday from 6-10 at Tractor (1.7.10). If you’re in town, stop by (map).

Learn more about the piece here.

continuing along with my exploration into cities- an interactive piece I’m currently building in OpenFrameworks that utilizes openCV and openGL to generate and move through a virtual city. Still trying to overcome frame-rate issues, which will probably only be solved by getting a faster computer. I love my 13 macbook pro, but it just can’t handle things like this.

Show Details below:

For BETA Spaces 2009 The New Experimental Cinema Club is showing artists who work with classically didactic medium (including but not limited to video, books, and text) Our show is a collection of art which explores the inner and outer chaos of civilization and the experience of modern living. We attempt work that explores formlessness while rooting itself firmly in a personal/political experiment in expression.