Trying to decipher the new and the old in a perspective of instantaneous short messages, WHATisWHAT sifts and harvests Twitter.com for blurbs that contain the terms 'is the new'. The result is an infinitely-growing web of tags and associations linking new things to their now-obsolete equivalents.
Social media has become the platform of choice for sharing our experiences, and networked objects such as smart phones and portable netbooks are leading the way in providing the hardware and software to let us easily do so. The first aim of the project was to build a map of collective intelligence based on the empirical data sent in the form of tweets in order to observe the changing trends and ideals of the digitally connected. As data grew over time, it also became a great way of visualizing serendipitous associations and interesting conceptual leaps created by different unrelated people. A recurring critique of Twitter's functioning is its lack of substance and context due to the short length of messages. WHATisWHAT is trying to be the glue for all these disconnected ideas and provide some context to help frame this data.
A small note on the data of this project : my scripts are non-discriminatory in the feeds they pick up (of course), but I still need to sanitize what it finds with some more coding in order to avoid semantic incoherences, even if structurally, certain passages do contain "is the new". I query twitter once an hour and get about 10 results (5-6 usable) for each operation. Duplicates are not saved to the database.
Done as an assignment during the months of february and march to support my application to the Piet Zwart Institute - Willem de Kooning Academy at Rotterdam University for the masters in Media design and Communication : Networked media.
Any questions about this project should be directed to this guy, if you feel like you could do something interesting with these associations, just ask him and access to an xml file can be made available.
Social media has become the platform of choice for sharing our experiences, and networked objects such as smart phones and portable netbooks are leading the way in providing the hardware and software to let us easily do so. The first aim of the project was to build a map of collective intelligence based on the empirical data sent in the form of tweets in order to observe the changing trends and ideals of the digitally connected. As data grew over time, it also became a great way of visualizing serendipitous associations and interesting conceptual leaps created by different unrelated people. A recurring critique of Twitter's functioning is its lack of substance and context due to the short length of messages. WHATisWHAT is trying to be the glue for all these disconnected ideas and provide some context to help frame this data.
A small note on the data of this project : my scripts are non-discriminatory in the feeds they pick up (of course), but I still need to sanitize what it finds with some more coding in order to avoid semantic incoherences, even if structurally, certain passages do contain "is the new". I query twitter once an hour and get about 10 results (5-6 usable) for each operation. Duplicates are not saved to the database.
Done as an assignment during the months of february and march to support my application to the Piet Zwart Institute - Willem de Kooning Academy at Rotterdam University for the masters in Media design and Communication : Networked media.
Any questions about this project should be directed to this guy, if you feel like you could do something interesting with these associations, just ask him and access to an xml file can be made available.
 | What's in, what's out? |
Scraped twitter about 4656 times in the last 194 days, looking for the terms 'is the new'.
25187 results total
or
just view the last 100 associations