For class we have to pick a data source that updates often and returns a lot of information. I’m going to use Twitter because Stewart recommends it. I’d like to visualize something involving the new ITP vending machine, but I’m not sure what yet, exactly. There are other vending machines that tweet, so maybe a comparison between the few. Or maybe some comparison between ITP students who tweet and the vending machine stock.
I found a tutorial that shows you how to work with the Twitter API and Processing.
For next week’s assignment, we’re supposed to plot locational data on a sphere. Since the vending machine is only in New York, I can’t use it for this project. So I think I’ll do some sort of visualization with Unicode Snowman and it’s use around the world. A first pass at the query reveals that some people use it for weather, some people use it to end their tweets, like the period on a sentence or a signature, and most people seem to use it randomly– nestled in an array of other unicode characters.
testing comments!