Histogram of major words in the US Stimulus Bill. Big Grey blob in the second "mountain peak" from the left represents "Health" in the Bill. You can see it takes a disproportionate place in everything.

The Stimulus Mountains

Originally uploaded by sintixerr

This is a follow-up to a previous post and is philosophically related to this post.

On the subject of these “data visualizations as art”, I’ve been trying to better articulate why I think they’re art and how I’m trying to evolve my process.

What it comes down to is that there seems to be two pieces to developing the visualizations:

1. Choosing the right structure and things to measure about the text or data…what makes sense to compare to what. How do you reduce the noise and non-dependent variables? Each type of text you’re measuring and each circumstance has different relationships. There is a lot of science to this part, but it’s not completely predicatable. There is art.
2. How do you visually best enhance and needle out the important details, contrast between points, etc so that they can be “seen” in the noise that doesnt matter? This is all art. Understanding how color, shape, contrast, etc all work together and how to use all of those to present a dense amount of information without being overwhelming is tricky and depends on the skill of the one creating it…

It’s my belief that playing to what we understand as people’s abilities to process and comprehend aesthetics in art involves exactly the same techniques and takes advantage of the same aspects of peoples brains/senses as good visual data analysis. So, if you’re doing data analysis, you start out figuring out #1, and then move to #2 based on #1.

What I was trying to do with these stimulus images – and the last of my security visualizations – was start out with concepts of what I’d like for #2 (how they would “feel”) and then figure out what I needed to do in #1 (massage the data) to get there…while still remaining true to the underlying information.

Next up (and once I learn more Objective C), I’m going to try and read in the stimulus bill to Quartz Composer and combine my recent interactive/music visualizations with the Bill. We’ll see if that goes anywhere interesting.

Also, Artomatic returns to DC this year. I very well may be displaying this stuff there when it comes around. This or the music/webcam visualizations.

First, I grabbed the full text of the bill from HERE. Then, I wrote some (stupidly) simple python (again, I’m never sure if it’s -good- python) to parse the bill and turn it into a new file with five columns: Word Number, Word Length, Line Number, Work Position in Line, and the actual Word itself. This essentially turned the bill into a a text file with every word in the bill on its own line (in the order it showed up), but with  machine readable meta-data I could use to visually represent it.

stimulus = open(‘/Users/sintixerr/Documents/stimulus.txt’, ‘r’)
finalfile = open(‘/Users/sintixerr/Documents/sdump.txt’, ‘w’)
linenum=0
wordnum=0
lineposition=0
gstruct=[]
for line in stimulus:

lineposition=0
linenum+=1
word=line.split(‘ ‘)
word=word[:len(word)-1]
for w in word:

lineposition+=1
wordnum+=1
gstruct=str(wordnum)+’\t’+str(linenum)+’\t’+str(lineposition)+’\t’+w.upper()+’\t’+str(len(w))+’\n’
finalfile.write(gstruct)

stimulus.close()
finalfile.close()

Then, I opened up the new tab delimited bill in my visualizer of choice and ran it through a few different ways of representing the bill.

First, the raw text – without any real manipulation – looked cool in and of itself and I noticed some interesting, if obvious in hindsight, features. (I did clean out some obviously bad data first with a little  sed action, but that mostly just involved removing punctuation that caused the same words to show up as different ones. )

Stimulus Bill Visualized in its Entirety. In this image, the Y axis represents every word (ASCII characters with spaces or carriage returns on either side) in the bill and the X axis represents the Line Numbers those words appeared on.

First, if you look about a fourth of the way from the left, and then again closer to halfway, you see a vertical “break” in the scatterplot where it looks like the density is much lower.  That is probably a major section break in the original document (I honestly haven’t actually read it in english yet).  That possibility is supported by the second observation which is: Even in human written documents, you can still discern protocol visually. (Again, obvious, but it’s neat.).  If you look at the bottom third of the image, it looks nothing like the top 2/3.  Much more curving paths, fewer horizontal lines, less density, etc.  If you look at those “words”, they’re all document structure words (like section numbers, headings, etc.). …and monetary figures.  If you look closely, there appear at first glance to be two or more incompatible or unrelated document content structures there.  Above that section is where the more obvious “free form” english exists in the set.

Moving on from there, I wanted to see if I could get anything intellectually or aesthetically interesting by using a scatterplot to draw out the shape of the bill.  To do that, I plotted “Line Number” on the X axis and “Position of Word in the Line” on the Y axis.  (Actually, originally those two were swapped, but the resulting image “looked better” when I swapped the X and Y).   I colored everything by Word on a categorical scale so things wouldn’t blend together too much and then ratcheted up the size scale to reduce empty space. I was looking for a visual representation of the literal structure of the document, not an analysis tool or I wouldn’t have done that last bit.

The resulting image looks like this:

Shape of the Stimulus Bill on its side. If you were to compress the actual text of the whole bill into one page and rotate it 90 degrees counter-clockwise, it would probably have the same shape as this, only with text.

Finally, I was curious if I could do a little manual clustering work. I tried to narrow down the words into the data set to those that might have some intrinsic meaning in the context of the stimulus bill. This means I got rid of prepositions, repeated filler words, etc.  I did this by knocking out every word under 4 letters and all of those over 17 chars (over 17 were all artifacts of turning the bill into something parsable, not actual real words).  Then I created a bar chart of words and sorted it by how often words appeared in the document and removed about the bottom 70% of words. I made an assumption (which is almost definitely so broad that the data will have to be sliced again a different way for meaningful analysis) that any words that weren’t repeated that often just werent a real “theme” to the people writing the document. Interestingly, things like “security” and “health” and some others were left in the set, but “cyber” was removed. Hmm.   After that, I went manually through the remaining set of words and removed those that seemed to not have any cluster value (both through intuition as well as by visually watching the scatterplot of the whole set while I highlighted individual words t see what lit up.) Finally, and lastly, since I originally wanted to make visually interesting things more than do real analysis, I used some blurring, resharpening, and layering to give a more cloudy, vibrant feeling to it.  Interestingly, that created “clouds” around many of the clusters and made them easier to make out for analysis.  That supports my whole theory that what the eyes and mind like to look at is what the mind and eyes are better able to make intelligent use of.

The final result is here:

Words of substance that might be indicative of topics or subjects within the bill. X axis, like the first picture, is line number and Y axis is Word.

]]> http://jackwhitsitt.com/2009/02/stimulus-bill-visualization-a-precursor-to-analysis-as-art/feed/ 3 http://jackwhitsitt.com/2008/10/art-and-security-a-norton-today-symantec-interview-with-me/ http://jackwhitsitt.com/2008/10/art-and-security-a-norton-today-symantec-interview-with-me/#comments Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:10:03 +0000 admin http://sintixerr.wordpress.com/?p=272 I’ve spammed this particular link everwhere else I can think of, but still neglected to post it here on my blog.

Basically, I was approached a few months ago by a senior editor of Symantec’s online magazine “Norton Today” because they were interested in doing a piece on Art and Security. I was approached because of my old work in security data visualization and the fact that’d I’d started to rework and hang the pieces in art shows like Artomatic and My Space on 7th.

Anyway, the interview went really well (in addition to being a lot of fun) and it’s now online at:

http://nortontoday.symantec.com/features/articles/art_of_security.php

(Edit: This link now appears down after a few months. Symantec has republished the article here: http://www.thegeekweekly.com/feature/turning_computer_vis_into_art/index.html )

They used a few older images in their Flash slideshow (My fault – I didnt get them newer images in time).  These were the originals we used at NetSec to do analysis and which have been in a number of presentations (and were in the batch I sent to ArcSight as examples when they were still developing Interactive Discovery, iirc).

You can find the “art” versions that I’ve hung up in galleries at the following link:

http://sintixerr.wordpress.com/art-versions-of-data-visualizations/

I’m still interested in working more of these, but have been moving from graphing – which was a necessity of the business at the time – into a broader field of ontological information/concept representation in art.

(This is in addition to my media experimentation with / interest in projection. I think Id like to merge these two tracks together in the future, but havent gotten there yet.)

I’m going to be showing some data visualizations at the My Space on 7th art show in Washington, DC starting Friday, July 11 at the Touchstone Gallery! Everyone should come out. I took a look at the space and there’s some interesting work hanging already. (And I have to thank Paige, here, who unintentionally helped me decide what to show…but more on that in a later post.)

Oh. And there will be wine tasting opening night.

There will be three old, but reworked images and one new one created just for this show.  Only one has ever been printed before and they all look pretty fantastic.

The new one consists of two superimposed graphs (a paraplot and a scatterplot) of illegitimate traffic going to/from “jackwhitsitt.com” (that would be, uh, most of it).

The three older ones are:

Destination Port Traffic Volume (global sample)

(Test Data from custom developed SEM correlation  modules)

(Pcap data from 10,000 spam emails)

Tonight, however, I had the good fortune to be given a tour of something particularly special in a place just like that.

This evening, during one of my brief visits to Second Life (opening an island takes a lot of planning – not much time to socialize), I asked my good friend Eshi Otawara how the opening of her collaborative project, Parsec, had gone Saturday night. Apparently it had gone quite well and she almost immediately offered to teleport me over to the installation area. After briefly tweaking my headphones and mic (which I had been warned were required!) and a couple of other technical difficulties, I was whisked over to a dark room with a couple of other individuals.

This, apparently, was a waiting area of sorts while everyone got themselves in order for the experience. Eshi handed me some animations and told me to activate them. Seven people were normally required to “operate” Parsec, I was told, but we were going to make do with 3-4 and the animations were a critical component of the piece.

Finally, we eventually all touched the grey teleport sphere and were taken up to the feature presentation. At this point I still wasn’t sure what it was about, other than there was some interactive tie in between voice, music, and visual imagery.

We found ourselves standing on a transparent floor inside of a giant white sphere, the inside of which was textured in a way that reminded me of hundreds of CD’s. Around us were seven black balls, each with a unique pattern of dots on them. Eshi essentially then turned us loose and just told us to…talk. So we did. Not sure, at first, of what was expected of us (what DO you say when someone asks you to just ‘talk’?) we wandered around vocalizing somewhat arbitrarily. What we found was that, as we spoke the balls moved. As the balls moved, we heard the sounds of instruments.

What we were experiencing was the first installation in Second Life where the environment responded to the sound of a voice. Each person in the sphere was linked to one of the black spheres around them. As an individual spoke, a certain behavior by the sphere – and thus a certain set of sounds – was triggered depending on how your voice sounded at the time. There were 10 (or 16? I dont remember the exact number) of “ranges” that each person could trigger from his or her sphere.

The sum effect is that, as 7 or more people have a conversation in the installation, the environment reacts visually and audibly and creates a multi-sensory symphony written just for those people in those moments in time. The visuals were minimalistic, at that point, but effective. (And they got better, I found out later!)

Another particularly interesting facet of Parsec is that there is a piece of it (pictured below in an image from their Flickr pool) which can only be unlocked through the unguided collaboration of the participants! As you “play” the Parsec instrument/exhibit with others, you apparently might find that there are patterns or connections embedded and that, if you speak in cooperation, this new visual component is revealed and you find yourself immersed in something akin to a starbursting eye of horace.

As an artist, I’m intrigued by this cooperation required to complete the artwork. People have to figure out the problem and then work together to solve it. Rather than just being something built with the mathematics of music and aesthetics in mind, a human element and the human mind if required to make it “work” completely. For all of the traditional art out there with NO connection to the human condition, it’s cool to see a virtual one that manages instead to stay true to (what I think is) one of the primary roles of art in society – exploring ourselves.

For those naysayers who get visibly -angry- when they found out people spend time in Second Life and that there’s nothing there “to do”, this kind of art not only unequivocally proves that not only are there things “to do” that you don’t find anywhere else, but also that the it has been and is continuing to evolve as an art medium in its own right.

Congrats to the creators of Parsec for creating such a cool contribution to art and technology:

Concept, Music and Sound by Dizzy Banjo
Virtual Architecture by Eshi Otawara
Scripting by Chase Marellan

More info and a video can be found here: http://eshiotawara.wordpress.com/2008/01/19/41/

Eshi, thank you so much for the on-the-spot tour. It was fun to hear your voice for the first time and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to you in the role of a tour guide! I also am still smiling at the thought of you, alone, standing in Parsec singing to the machine.

I really don’t spend all of my time in Second Life (despite the recent frequency of posts about it). In fact, lately, it’s only been 2 hours a week or so.

However, a fellow WordPress browser recently commented here on an entry asking why people don’t pay more attention to “the real world” than Second Life. It was a good question – but easily answered. One of the responses is that SL makes a particularly interesting way of communicating with groups of people remotely. Much better than voice conferences, videocasts, etc.

Here’s one example seen in a recent in-world announcement:

Paulo Casaca, member of the European Parliament of the European Union, will appear live, to discuss the Iraqi Conflict on Friday, January 18th @ 12pm SL time. The region will be closed to entry during this event. Mr. Casaca is the first member of European Union to launch a Second Life presence, to discuss global concerns with all citizens. Efforts to examine the Iraq Conflict, in a search for solutions, included travel to this region in January of 2007. The results of his findings were presented in an issued report to the European Parliament – and continued to world wide universities and institutions. Mr. Casaca is a former Professor of Economics with the Azores University. Registration is limited -register via email to irah_anatine@hotmail.com or via SL note/im. Students, educators and media will be given privileged access.

Ok, so the picture isnt of anything to do with EU or SL…but it DOES make you think of things vaguely gov’t! (And I guess propaganda related. Hmm. Heh)

So, while we’re working out the logistics for opening an entire Second Life island for Washington, DC artists, art events, and arts organizations to utilize, I’ve moved some of my own stuff into a small scratch space to test architectural concepts.

There isn’t much there right now that you can’t find on flickr, but I’m building a virtual take on the Ofrenda / Day of the Dead installation Angela, Paivi, and I built at the Art Outlet show. The movie streams into Second Life and is surrounded by some virtual concept art.

You can find the space and the exhibit HERE

Below is a snapshot of me sitting down, watching the movie and getting a feel for what needs to be built next:

Eep. The year’s over! That might seem old news (God, we’re already a week into 08), but the sad thing is that to remember what I’ve been doing for the last few months I had to go back to my Flickr stream and -look- at the photographic evidence! Kind of cool…but not?

But before I get into what -has- happened, I’d like to talk about what is and -will- happen. I just spent a lovely evening at the soon-to-be-no-more Dr. Dremo’s in Arlington with a bunch of the Art Outlet volunteers, artists, other board members, and friends.

One of the reasons I was there was to talk about digital art shows and the imminent re-opening of my free space for Washington, DC artists and arts events in Second Life – the SintixErr Gallery. (About which Amanda Hess has written a great article: http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=34394 )

It looks like Art Outlet (the board of which I chair – at least for one more year!) will be, as a 501c(3) non-profit arts organization in DC, will be sponsoring an entire island in Second Life. My high level goals for the island will be to:

• Provide a place for any DC-based artist to exhibit their work to worldwide audience
• Host mixed-reality events in support of Art Outlet shows
• Provide a central Second Life hosting capability for other DC arts organizations, museums, galleries, etc.
• Allow for additional research into interesting ways to use virtual worlds to aid art through technology and technology through art.

There’s still no -monetary- sponsor for this (and it’s not a done deal till it’s done), but I can front the cost initially and hope through grants, donations, shows, and by way of small fees for other organizations to use the space, the area will support itself and break even.

In addition to the pure Second Life announcement, I’ve also been working on putting together (and participating in) one or more digital arts and technology shows in the DC area. These are still in their infancy, but there are a number of great, dedicated, reliable people working on them and I expect some cool event news to show up here in the next few months.

You can find more info here on what some of the participating artists’ thoughts on technology, culture, and art are in this thread:

http://artdc.org/forum/index.php?topic=7860.msg33345#msg33345

I’ll close out this post with my own thoughts from that thread:

I have two perspectives on technology’s role in culture, as it pertains to my art. First, I’ve always struggled with the concept that there is “technology” and “stuff that isn’t technology”. I never really believed that there was an inherent line there. The only thing that really rings true is Douglas Adams’ quote on the subject. He said something to the effect of “Technology means ‘stuff that isn’t quite working right yet’”. Pencils, oil paint, paper, cameras – they’re all technology. They’re absolutely the same thing as computers and any other digital mechanisms for interacting with human senses.

So, my first interest in technology, art, and culture is in the process of cultural integration of new technology into the “stuff that works” category. Things we forget about. I’m interested in the creation of and interaction with art that REFUSES to distinguish between itself and any other “old” tools used to create art. I like to see moving images framed behind museum quality glass hanging from a wall. I enjoy the idea of traditional tools being used as part of the creation of what would otherwise be considered “new technology” art.

Along these lines, I’m also fascinated by the artifical lines and boundaries we (humans) create to keep our perception of the universe coherent. Technology has always helped people do more better faster, but until the advent of science allowing long distance communication between people, our boundaries expanded, but tended to retain the same shapes. As people began to communciate over vast distances, however, our sense of “place” began to erode a little bit. TV accelerated that process, cell phones turned the process into an avalanche, and the internet looks like it might eradicate the bond between place and self altogether in our culture. Not only that, but with the variety of identities we are begining to maintain, our most basic sense of “self” is getting fuzzy. Who are we when we can “be” in multiple places at once. Who are we when we can be physically perceived by others in different ways at the same time? We have IM accounts, blog accounts, we exist (well, some of us ) in virtual worlds, etc. Part of how we perceive and understand who we are ourselves is by how we are reflected back by other people. What happens to us as our reflections become fractured and non-contiguous?

Art, over time, has often been used to explore our relationship – as people – to the universe around us. In my mind, these particular technologically-wrought changes in our culture are acute and our exploration of them as humans is well-served by doing so through art.

Often, I’ve wondered if my skittishness with regard to staying with specific projects implies of level of dilettantism that I’d rather not have to attribute to myself. I mean, between pastel and other 2D drawing media, Second Life, art installations, and – now – photography, I seem to be just cycling through whatever catches my interest.But then, I read my own artist’s statement and remember why I wrote it.

I’m not interested in “working in pastel”. Nor does the live digital art playground hold my particular interest for its own sake.

Rather, as my artist statement indicates, Im interested in the fabric of life itself and the myriad of ways it can both manifest itself and be explored. And by “fabric of life”, I mean specifically “people”: Who they are, what the word “self” means in an age where day to day reality itself has become functionally abstract, and the difference between automation and soul in terms of what it means to be alive.

Lest my unusually flowery and overly descriptive language put you off, you should be aware of two things. First, I’m sitting in Reagan National airport for the next two hours and really have nothing better to do. Secondly, and probably more pertinently, this entry had a distinct, concrete moment of birth in my head.

Last week (let’s call it Tuesday for the sake of detail), I was looking at my recent flood of photographs and noticed that the ones I – and others on flickr – seemed to consider the most interesting and mature were of people. Portraits, specifically, were what comes to mind when looking at them.

Funny – I hadn’t consciously intended to do that. I don’t look around and try to grab “people”; I photograph whatever seems to be an interesting or off perspective of wherever I am at the time. And I do get the rest of the world – objects, landscapes, flora, fauna, etc. But (at least to me) they lack that special something that makes them live. I try and look for the times when the body, environment, and mind are in sync – the moments when the soul is looking out of the eyes instead of inside. For most people, those moments are only brief and I like to capture them when I think I see them.

More interesting, still, is that that is (as Ive said elsewhere) where my 2D drawing focus is most of the time. It’s what Im drawn to. Ive even tried to trick myself out of drawing people – and it doesn’t work. The other material is passable, but only just so
Well, you might ask (if youve made it this far) – what about Second Life? That’s about as soulless as you can get! Maybe so, but virtual words force us to take apart and examine, piece by piece, what “existing” as a human consists of and means. We’ve always assumed, in a secular sense, that location and presence and appearance are all properties of existence. We cant be “here” unless “here” is “somewhere”. So what of ourselves when we’re not “here”, but somewhere without physical properties? With the phone, the web, and even online text chat we’ve managed to avoid that question by virtue of not having a replacement “there” from which to reference ourselves. In those cases, we’re very much on either side of the line.

On the other hand, in virtual worlds, we’re dead smack in the middle and it fascinates me. What I think it will force us to do is to rethink some of the core concepts which have ruled our philosophies and ways of life since time began. I don’t think of this in terms of high level abstractions, but core one – almost at the meta linguistic level of human thought. We, as a species, may begin to think (at a root level) in terms more formally (from an engineering perspective) in harmony with the reality of the world around us and not be limited to those abstractions we’ve evolved by way of input from our 5 senses.

In all cases, though, it’s about people, life, and their contribution to “real” – regardless of medium

Meep.