VJ Um Amel
VJ Um Amel is the cyborg imagination and the virtual representation of Laila Shereen Sakr, a digital media theorist and artist. She is a creative coder and immersive storyteller known for creating the award-winning media system, R-Shief.
Researching Big, Visual Data
Digital Media Prototyping - FAMST 248
Tuesday, January 14, 2020
Prof. L. Shereen Sakr
background>
MODERN ART,
STATISTICS,
DATA SCIENCE,
DATA VISUALIZATION
1. Two Modern Abstractions
- STATISTICAL GRAPHS (1800-)
-
ABSTRACT ART (1900-)
Florence Nightingale, who is famous for her contributions to medicine, invented the “rose diagram” which enabled improved sanitation for soldiers on the battlefield during the Napoleonic wars.
In the 19th century, the railway and canal building industries also began to build ever more complex representations of their transport networks. Famously Minard, the French engineer, developed maps (one of which is shown below) to demonstrate why charging systems on the canal should be higher for partially completed journeys.
Kazimir Malevich
Black Square. 1915
Analysis from the Tate mentions, "It is the first time someone made a painting that wasn't of something."
Jackson Pollock
Full Fathom Five. 1947
Oil on canvas created, in part, with tacks, coins, cigarettes, and much more.
2. Modern Art v. Modern Science
(1600-1900)
- ART: showing general types though the
concrete (people, landscape, etc.)
-
SCIENCE: modeling / explaining the
regular; concerned with general laws
(example: linear regression: y = xB + e)
Henri Matisse
Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life), 1905-1906.
Vincent
Van Gogh
Sunflowers. 1888-1889
Example of scientific method: modeling the general
3. Visualization without reduction?
- how to combine concrete and abstract?
-
can we create visualizations that show
patterns but do not use aggregation and
abstraction?
One possible “visualization without reduction” method: one method is to create visualizations show all images in a dataset without reducing them to points, bars, etc. By sorting the images in different ways we can see patterns. Below: Manovich's Software Studies Lab.
Cultural Analytics
1. LOOKING AT EVERYTHING AT ONCE
2. SEEING CONTINUOS CHANGES
3. THINKING WITHOUT CATEGORIES?
4. VISUALIZING THE SOCIAL
- using the complete data (or at least a larger sample that represents the phenomenon well)
- more inclusive cultural history
- seeing what has been excluded
- mapping contemporary cultural fields
1. LOOKING AT EVERYTHING AT ONCE
Seeing the museum
collection: 20,000 photographs
from MoMA,1844-1989.
Organized by year
(top to bottom). Each bar shows
photographs from a particular
year.
or close-up
2. SEEING CONTINUOUS CHANGE
- visualizing cultural and stylistic changes in time
- seeing continuous historical change (instead of discrete periods / stages)
3. THINKING WITHOUT CATEGORIES?
- from categories to continuous descriptions - computer describes properties of media using continuous variables (example: RGB color values)
- instead of using a small number of categories, we extract hundreds or thousands of features from every object
- do features determine what we can see in the data?
4. VISUALIZING THE SOCIAL
(using visual social media)
- creating portraits of society through social media data
- using social media as lens into society
- interactive interfaces for exploring large visual social media
- analysis of contemporary popular digital photography
Researching Big, Visual Data
By VJ Um Amel
Researching Big, Visual Data
FAMST 248 - first lecture
