Theorizing the Web 2011 featured several projected installations. In this post, I want to highlight the Twitter visualize produced by Vicky Lai, an undergraduate at the University of Maryland. Vicky explained her project to me, saying:
The tweet cloud generator was inspired by research with the Social Media Micro-Modeling group at UMD and started as a final project for a Digital Cultures and Creativity course. Originally designed to visualize popular words in a Twitter user’s social network (of followers/following to a certain depth), the project was modified to collect tweets containing “#ttw2011” and visualize the most frequent words. Word clouds are generated by IBM’s word cloud generator, the program used on the popular Wordle site.
The visualization automatically regenerated a couple times each minute, which enabled attendees to watch different words trend over time as the conversation in the conference itself shifted.
Vicky Lai is a freshman computer science and economics major at the University of Maryland, College Park, and is part of the new Digital Cultures and Creativity Honors program. Her interests include web and graphics design, social media research, and mobile development, along with occasional tweeting at @vicky1a1.
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Reflections on Theorizing the Web « PJ Rey's Sociology Blog Feed — April 19, 2011
[...] The event was heavily documented. Audio, video, images, and reviews are available on the Cyborgolgy blog. To emphasize the recursivity of the online and offline world, much of this content was projected during the conference. Additionally, the we featured two installations: one by Ned Drummond and one by Vicky Lai. [...]