As Far As I Can Tell

This semester I’m in an excellent information visualization class co-taught by Golan Levin and Ben Fry. One of the types of visualizations we’ve looked at is a collection, a way of representing something through various samples that in some way reveals a whole. An example that Golan provides is Stacy Greene’s Lipsticks, or other work in the book SPECK: A Curious Collection of Uncommon Things.

For my latest project in the class I decided to create a collection by asking people I knew to draw photos of me. My goal was to create a portrait of myself that also represented the contributors and their relationship to me in some way. There is a lot of rich and qualitative information embedded in the final piece, some of which may be meaningful only to me. Regardless, I’m happy with the results and would like to say thank you to the 49+ people who helped me out.

Other projects of mine from the class include Do you mean Pennsylvania or…? (cities in PA with the same name as elsewhere in the world) and Members’ forum by branch (historical patterns of forum posting for Moped Army branches). These two were done in Processing so they require that you have Java installed.