~a visual journal~

Alas, tis the end of my tumblr journey for Visualizing Data Through Art. Here is a small data vis of my tumblr posts that summarises each post. I think throughout this course I found a lot things interesting which is reflected in the amount of circles with dotted lines. I think to learn, you always have to be curious about it, and take everything arms open and then catalog it into a resource folder in your mind.

Stefeny Cheng

On and off, May 2020

Interactive Webpage, P5JS, javascript This work is an exploration and a reflection of my personal experience during quarantine. Lights across the street were a symbol of hope that people still existed, still alive and still well. It was comforting to see, something as simple lights, still shine across the street of mine.  And so, the lights ‘on’ or ‘off’ of my neighbours were used to create this art piece.

Alrighty - I know i’ve just jumped straight forward into updating and finalising this tumblr to the final project.

Some ‘thank yous’...

I think I wasn’t able to update my tumblr because I was so stressed about my code not being able to work. I was fustrated and upset being unable to figure out the mistakes - felt pretty useless at this point. I reached out to a friend, which I was hesitate to at first, but glad that I did.

He helped me check the code and explained to me why certain errors happened. He also explained to me what the code I wrote actually meant. He also helped me out a lot and gave me a lot of good advice - especially functions and code that he knows from experience that might be useful for him. So i thank him.  Thank you Keith for helping me bring direction to my work :)

Lastly I would also like to thank Karen. I dont know how you do it but you put 100% into every student. I don’t know how many emails I’ve sent you, and by the time I was writing to you like it was a text conversation, I realized how much I appreciate the support you gave me throughout this project. Thank you!

Also, a shoutout to my friends in class, Jo, Lauren, Julia and all the other people i’ve met in class. I think overall, hearing updates from each other inspired me to continue and go forwards because there were many times where I just wanted to give up lol.

In conclusion, I’m really... really happy of what I managed to do to get to this final stage! I’m happy and satisfied. (which i never thought I would eventualy feel)

Alright! I totally feel like a kindergardener learning their shapes. (look mum I did it!) I’ve kinda gotten the structure of my post card ready! However, working out the code for the next few steps will be the hardest. I made a binary code translator the other day... progress???

The part that I dreaded the most... is here. After some further deliberations and iterations of my ideas I finally accepted where this was going and decided to code what I could manage. I set up a ‘plans of action’ pdf to convince me that my project was doable from scratch by someone with no experience in code, but also to act as a guideline for what steps I needed to take in the next following weeks.

I think i forgot to mention that in the beginning I was focusing more on using Processing to help me out with my project, but eventually after delving between processing and p5js, I found that the interface of p5js was really intuitive. And the web editor they have is really handy.  

I also decided to move away from Markov chains because the idea of predicting and having an algorithm decide the poetry didn’t sit right with me and the conceptual part for my project. I want this project to focus mainly on how the lights can be translated into messages of hope during quarantine. So I looked into how I could use the ‘0’s and ‘1’s to select a word from a column of words from poetry that related to ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ .

Process development #7

Honestly I didn’t know how stuck and I guess ‘demotivated’ I would get trying to tackle this class. In week 11’s class we were able to share with the class in regard to the stage where everyone is, and whilst my idea is quite set in stone and I like it, its a struggle to try and nail it by yourself. Everytime Karen comes in, I feel like I can do it and that its achievable, but as soon as she leaves, the magic of it all leaves too and I’m stuck. 

(to be honest, in hindsight, the amount of code I need to do isn’t very much!) But for someone like me who is an absolute code noob i feel, extremely behind. Not for this class, but almost a realisation that I am behind in the world of digital coding and algorithms. 

I can’t believe 9 year olds are learning this and I’m only starting now!

I decided to follow some tutorials, stuff to do with binary numbers, markov chains, numbers and all that jazz and Sam Lavigne from The coding train just makes you feel like you can do it. Highly recommended for those who wanna learn more about Processing and javascript! 

I am now looking to something called ‘Markov chains’ and perhaps creating my own so that I can predict my neighbours lights?

There has been further development with my feasible ideas… here it is. 

8 apartments ➜ gives me an 8-value binary string every hour ➜ use the photo to code python and ‘threshold values’ to make light object into 1’s and black into ‘0’s ➜ have each binary string generate a random word ➜ 8 word poem for each day. 

My only concern is that its quite random… like the words of poetry are being extracted from a database of words that have no relation to my data. So perhaps there is still some improvement needed. 

Today’s class was hilarious, I think everyone in general was going mad with code, especially Karen but it was hilarious. We talked and discussed absurd data, data that makes no sense or it does but doesn’t have much impact on anything important. Fun data. (wow there's such a thing???) We went into our little breakout groups, and we did a pretty simple graph about what 2020 has experienced and what we’ve consumed the last few months. Because we were mostly discussing our own projects with each other.