#individual study

How coronavirus charts can mislead us | Vox

A detailed analysis of how the popular case count chart can visually mislead us, if we don’t assess how data bias may have significantly played a part in its formation.

Week 3 | Time, Whatever That Means These Days

I loved the material that Karen presented to us during week 3 (despite the strange transitional period into online classes). She spoke about time: how it is the environment in which data can be observed. 

There was one particular quote I loved.

“Clock time,” she said, “is a human construct, like money! That we take for granted until there is a... suspension, of some sort.”

It’s so true that time is, in fact, very much a construct. This was also the first time I learned that there are so many concepts of time: celestial time, biological time, psychological time... even in clock times, we have timezones! Where a man in Singapore is sharing in my happy hour or that I awake as America rests for the day! Look at this – a jumbled little constructed thing, and we just chose for ourselves which ones to abide by.

What a funny, funny thing.

Another thing that I found very interesting was psychological time: Time in waiting rooms, for instance, always seems like forever, whereas weekends or holidays just float right past.

Psychological time speaks of time as we experience it in our own heads. In Karen’s words, “aggravated by anxiety, diminished by joy.”

Now excuse me if this post is constantly bumping into some philosophical wall, but understanding these is fascinating. Given that now, in these circumstances, my concept of time is particularly non-existent.

I only know of day and night, sunrise to sunset (and even that was hit a bit awry with the daylight savings shifting earlier this week.) Weekends don’t matter as much. Our psychological time, however – oof. If it’s meant to be “aggravated by anxiety”, I reckon that, as we sit inside, constantly in waiting, this psychological time has scaled ten- and twentyfold.

The most significant rude awakening I experienced with this was realising that Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite won four Oscars only early February. More or less a month before face-to-face classes were officially suspended. And don’t get me started on how long and arduous the days that followed were.

We hear it everywhere, in fact! March was the longest month. 

It very much was. Psychological time completely at play.

But oh well.

Week 2 | Individual Study

My favourite out of the list of links & references we had for Week 2, which explored the topic of maps.

I found this website to be very captivating. 

First was the Continents & Countries. Imagine mapping out *all* the ways one can reach Rome, from 486,713 starting points all across Europe. (The more often a specific single street segment was used, the stronger it is displayed on the map, hence the different stroke weights of the “branches”.)

But what I loved beyond that was their Cities study: Urban Mobility Fingerprint and Street DNA.

Routing from many places to a single destination, on a much smaller scale, helped them find characteristics of cities around the world.

In these maps, (A) shows the single destination to which the roads lead to, whereas (B) are the departure points, located on a radius around the destination. Size of the radius is defined by travel time with different transportation modes, therefore making the "Urban Mobility Fingerprint".

Once the routes are drawn, all starting points are rotated and aligned on to one ideal connection line. The direct line between these two dots is the ideal connection between the two locations. The length of the routes is scaled to fit the connecting ideal line. This resulting graph is the "Street DNA".

Since, in reality, street connections never follow a perfectly straight line, deviations are unavoidable. The Street DNA graph shows exactly these situations. The colours identify to what compass point routes are aligned on the map.

I’m in awe with what the graphic outcomes of this project. The whole algorithm was explained in a very clear, succinct way, and these results are so telling of the different cities’ infrastructures and efficiency, in regards to their city planning & development over the years.

1. The California Island

These maps are two of the many that Glen McLaughlin collected since 1971. They are maps that show California as an island, afloat well apart from the North America continent. The first map he took home with him was from 1633.

He bought the map and hung it in his entryway, where it quickly became a conversation piece. It soon grew into an obsession, and McLaughlin began to collect other maps with the California island.

The first mention of California as an island is in Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo’s “Las Sergas de Esplandián,” published in 1510. It came from Montalvo’s imagination, and therefore was firmly embedded in 17th and 18th century maps. It was not until Father Eusebio Kino’s map, “A Passage by Land to California,” which was informed by his travels in the 1700s, exposed the mistake. 

Glen McLaughlin collected nearly 800 island of California maps over a period of 40 years, making his the largest privately held collection of maps ever known. 

The old maps represent an epic cartographic blunder, but they also contain a kernel of truth, the writer Rebecca Solnit argued in a recent essay. "An island is anything surrounded by difference," she wrote. And California has always been different – isolated by high mountains in the east and north, desert in the south, and the ocean to the west, it has a unique climate and ecology. It's often seemed like a place apart in other ways too, from the Gold Rush, to the hippies, to the tech booms of modern times.

McLaughlin, now 80, spent most of his career as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. He says the maps dominated his home decor for much of the past four decades. But no more. "I do miss them, but it's time to let them go," he said. "I've had a good long run with them."

Week 1 | Individual Study

Among the many things our class covered in our first meeting, I noted down some references and terms I could learn from, based off of Karen’s presentation.

1) The MoMA Poll: Why was it so profound? Because it was beyond its time – emerging in an era where it wasn’t as customary for works of art to publicly critique a sociopolitical issue. (Notice how now, this sort of critique has instead become a very massive playing field for artists, filmmakers, musicians, et – which is a good thing!) But of course, beyond that, was Hans Haacke’s piece of work, that was to be displayed in the very museum which the subject of his critique – Govt. Rockefeller – was a large benefactor of. I went on a slight tangent and researched what the Indochina policy was all about. Knowing it involved not only war but also a genocide in Cambodia – all while war was, for the first time ever, starting to become televised and shown to the public, I fully understood the gravity of the question that Hans Haacke placed.

2) Jason Salavon: Synthesis art The second artist I looked up was Jason Salavon – his work of using synthesis as an art form is also very profound and telling. I analysed that Salavon’s art relies on two main things: Structure, and mass. His artwork presents massive quantities of data, inviting awe and intrigue from the viewer. Not only that, his way of packaging and structuring them (linear? radial? in what format/medium?) adds to the element of play with the data. Limitations are set from the very beginning, and his artwork simply presents what forms of data/information pours into those boundaries. Some pieces I found quite impressive, out of the many:

Catalogue (2007) – http://www.salavon.com/work/Catalogue/ A suite of ten prints abstracts facing-page layouts from the 2007 IKEA catalogue based upon the page design, leaving only colour and structure.

100 Special Moments (2004) – http://salavon.com/work/SpecialMoments/ Features 100 photographs of commemorative moments in people’s lives, culled from the internet.

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Individual Study: Week Two: Music Complex

The assigned site is a Park which sits adjacent to the Siena Bus and train terminal. The Park, twice the size of Il Campo, is the largest enclosed open space in Siena. The assignment called for a new Siena musical complex to be designed on top of the park, which can welcome large crowds and interpret different programs for all seasons.