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The semester has passed by so quickly and what started of as an ambitious idea while I was brushing my teeth (it’s true!) has materialised into a WordPress.com site, with three amateur visualisations that I am nevertheless extremely proud of.

As my site grew bit by bit, I feel that I have grown with it, both in terms of skills and critical analysis of the data I was handling. And so I pen some of my thoughts in this post.

Ideas and goals

My initial idea for the project, Virtual Thumbprints, was intended to turn my own Facebook data into an abstract collage of network diagrams. I got really excited and started producing some visualisations on Gephi.

Network graph of friendships in the OSS NTU Facebook group

While comments from the class were positive, it just felt like there was something lacking in the idea. First, it felt too safe. I have taken a Network Perspectives class and am quite familiar with Gephi, so producing the visualisations would have just taken about 10 minutes each. Second, it didn’t seem like something that had external validity, meaning that it could be generalised to a greater context, and would be thought-provoking for people all over the world.

So I started thinking of other ideas, and coming across Manovich’s Phototrails proved to be the turning point. I read their project documentation and realised that they had developed a macro for ImageJ, a software I had never heard of before. Perfect!

Concept and technical realisation

I began envisioning what I could produced with ImageJ, and my long-held scepticism towards politicians’ Facebook pages somehow came in into the picture. As a Singaporean of Indian descent greatly influenced by American culture, it didn’t take me long to settle on studying PM Lee, PM Modi and President Obama, all of whom are active on Facebook.

Two of the politicians I decided to study just met for the first time yesterday!

As I started collecting my data, with the help of Juan, I did some preliminary analysis of the information I had, producing all sorts of interesting graphs. It occurred to me that I didn’t have to be restricted to ImageJ, for Excel, while commonly associated with dull administrative work, provides scope for creativity as well.

Graph of PM Lee’s Facebook likes per photo over time. The top three photos feature his father, former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew

While Excel is an excellent tool for critical analysis, feedback from the class also helped me realised that it is not dynamic enough, and also not best suited to the online medium. After all, net art is indeed about audience engagement and interactivity.

I was lost for a while and then remembered the open-source sharing platform Codepen we used in the Facebook network micro-project, where I can fork others’ pens to visualise my own data. So I produced a simple pen to replace my complicated word cloud. Not very impressive work, but I think it’s a great step for me because I was quite intimidated by code at first.

And along this process, my initial vision of using ImageJ has not faded away. I have been, and am still collecting data for ImageJ (I have 2700+ more jpeg files to download, rename and input the names into Excel), and hope to realise these visualisations soon.

Bridging my practice

Virtual Politics is based on the journalistic values of being faithful to information and presenting it with maximal accuracy. Settling on this principle was not an easy decision to make, but the process of consultations and documentation on this site helped me distill my thoughts on the issue.

At first, I wanted to break out of the mindset of a journalism student, but after some time, realised that what I truly wanted was to uphold transparency and accuracy. I wanted my work to stand up to scrutiny should someone important ever come across it, hence the more scientific approach to an art module. And I began to appreciate that art and science are not mutually exclusive, and that data visualisation on the Internet is a unique artistic approach to a traditionally scientific method of analysis.

Overall, I am really glad to have had the opportunity to immerse in data mining and visualisation, an invaluable skill to have in this information age. Surveillance through data visualisation is both fascinating and scary. As Manovich put it:

We seem to be back in the darkest years of Cold War, except that now we are being tracked with RFID chips, computer vision surveillance systems, data mining and other new technologies of the twenty first century.

-Manovich in What comes after remix? (2007)

I guess my message to Manovich would be that perhaps not all hope is lost. Because with open source software, the table can be turned, and the man-on-the-street may now have the ability to monitor the powers-that-be.

In my research post on The Feltron Report, I noted that Felton was in essence publishing a collection of data that no one else in the world would have – the numbers he collected are unique to his existence, similar to a thumbprint.

While Felton largely collected data from his real life, it occurs to me that the data trails we leave on the Internet are also likely to be unique to each individual. Even if I used the same software and algorithm to visualise two people’s data, the output would almost certainly be different. It was from this thought that I conceptualised the idea of a virtual thumbprint, created by visualising Facebook data.

In the reading Data Visualisation as New Abstraction and Anti-Sublime, Lev Manovich urges data visualisation artists to “not forget that art has a unique license to portray human subjectivity – including its fundamental new dimension of being ‘immersed in data’ “. While I will be producing individual network graphs and analysing them quantitatively first, I also hope to introduce a sense of subjectivity by arranging the different network graphs into a single mark, like a thumbprint, that symbolises the individual’s mark on the virtual world.

The process

I intend to use Gephi (for Mac) and/or NodeXL (for Windows) to produce the visualisations. The former produces aesthetically appealing visualisations while the latter is, in my opinion, easier to use for analytics, for instance in calculating the number of mutual friends or the shortest distance between two nodes.

My Facebook friend network on Gephi

The same network on NodeXL, using a different algorithm

I also intend to retrieve the data using apps such as Give Me My Data (which Juan taught us in the data visualisation micro-project) and the Facebook data import plug-in for NodeXL.

The output I hope to achieve is a composite of about 4-5 types of network graphs (eg. mutual friend network, liked pages network, group network) put together using Photoshop to achieve a unique virtual thumbprint. I have not decided the arrangement of the composite, but hope for it to be comprehensive yet not overly cluttered. I foresee that it with the heaps of unorganised data available, it will be challenging to decide which networks will be the best ones to use, so lots of exploration will be necessary.

The like network for my past 10 posts, visualised on NodeXL. Notice how NTU OSS members are well-connected to one another:)

I also hope to draw some comments on the individual’s Facebook interaction using the analytics that NodeXL provides. For instance, a high Eigenvector centrality in one’s friend network would suggest that the individual is well-connected to influential people, while a high closeness centrality indicates that information spreads very quickly in this network. It might be interesting to compile a short report on these findings, and compare it to real-life interaction eg. am I really close to the person that the data suggests is my closest friend?

The ambitious side of me also wants to produce an interactive thumbprint visualisation, similar to Juan’s Codepen visualisation. I have absolutely no idea how I might attempt this, but I’ll think about it along the way.

Constraints and concerns

My initial idea was actually to produce the thumbprints for prominent public figures, but then I realised that I have to be logged into a Facebook account in order to retrieve data. This presents a major limitation, for I now will only be able to produce thumbprints for individuals I personally approach and who are willing to share their data. I am therefore reducing the scope of this project to myself and friends who are willing. Even then, finding the right apps to obtain all the data I need will be a challenge.

The OSS Facebook group interaction network on Gephi (unlike the NodeXL plug-in, Give Me My Data doesn’t seem to retrieve specific groups’ data. Another app, Netvizz, worked but keeps the members anonymous)

Friendships among the NTU OSS Facebook group members

There is also the ethical question of whether I should release the names of people on the visualisations, or keep them anonymous. In analysing the data, having specific names will be useful, for it might enable comparison across different individuals’ thumbprints. However, I’m not sure if anyone will feel that their privacy is being infringed, so this will be another issue to ponder along the way.

Thoughts on collaboration

My concept is actually quite broad, and can be adapted to more specific contexts, if I can find the right apps to retrieve the data or learn how to manually create the edge list (a list of all the nodes and the relationships). I’m open to collaborating with anyone whose work allows for data visualisation and analysis:)

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Tag Archives: gephi

Virtual Politics: It’s not goodbye

[abandoned] Project concept: Virtual thumbprints