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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.

Phototrails is a series of data visualisations revealing the mark each individual leaves on the Internet via their posts on the social networking platform Instagram, and the collective effect of every individual’s post on a “spatial and temporal level”.

Visualisations of Instagram photos uploaded within the specific territorial spaces

Art-Science fusion

Data visualisation has been largely associated with the sciences, with notable milestones including the Human Genome Project and the advent of chemical imaging.

Manovich notes that while his tool is provided by the sciences, he wields it with an artistic purpose, thereby “painting with data”:

“We also have to use the same kind of charts and labels because it’s almost like a standard language used by science. But as an artist I am also interested in the question of how can I present the world through the data…Thinking about landscape paintings in Impressionism, Fauvism, or even Cubism, how could I represent nature today through the contributions of millions of people? So I think of myself as an artist who is painting with data. “

A montage (artistic technique) of data (scientific stuff)

Manovich also critiques the journalistic interpretation of data as the absolute truth:

“I’m basically trying to say that as opposed to a journalist who thinks about the “data” as a kind of truth, that it’s a way to find out what happened, what I’m thinking about is its own reality… It’s not a question of truth, it’s a question of making interesting connections.”

As a journalism student, this insight is especially captivating for me. A journalist is essentially a “data miner”, going out into the thick of the action to collect as many numbers, witness testimonies, photographs and sound bytes as we can – data which eventually determines the news angle. Manovich however, questions the assumption that data is objective, and instead proposes a new way of looking at data: from a macro perspective to form connections rather than to draw conclusions.

Technical realisation

I am intrigued by Manovich’s choice of Instagram as a repository of photo data. I initially thought that it was probably because Instagram has the richest collection of photographs, which would produce aesthetically-appealing visualisations. But through this week’s reading, realised that he is in fact motivated by the urge to democratise photojournalism:

“When popular media covers exceptional events such as social upheavals, revolutions, and protests, typically they just show you a few professionally shot photographs… Instagram has its own biases and it’s definitely not a transparent window into reality, but would give us, let’s say, a more democratic picture. “

The avoidance of Facebook and Twitter are also intentional, for Manovich was mindful that the uneven power distribution on these platforms would distort the data he obtains:

“We chose Instagram, specifically, because it was not an active tool for citizen journalism. Rather, it was used by a much smaller number of people. It wasn’t dominated by a few power users or by a few voices. “

The software Manovich and his team use is ImagePlot, which you can download for free here (hurray for open source software!!! It takes pretty long to download though). The techniques involved in creating the visualisations are also made transparent on here.

Open source culture

I am really inspired by Manovich’s creative exploration of the subjectivity of data through Phototrails, and am grateful that the thought processes and technicalities have been documented in such a transparent manner.

The visualisation techniques are clearly documented for everyone to understand

Like the hacker culture of the pre-Microsoft days, the data visualisation culture is approaching, if not already experiencing, its heyday. I find it absolutely amazing that data visualisation artists and scientists are largely working in an open-source environment right now, with the data-mining software and apps freely available for anyone. This is the ideal environment to generate innovative and thought-provoking data visualisation pieces that could fundamentally change the way we think and work.

However, I also have this fear that someday, the art/science of data visualisation will be commodified, and that the open source culture will be replaced by tech giants enforcing their proprietorship of data mining tools.

Is this just another irrational fear of mine? I sincerely hope so.

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Tag Archives: journalism

Virtual Politics: It’s not goodbye