Recently I’ve been following Jer Thorps’s Blog and I like some of the things he’s done so I thought I’d install Processing and see what I could come up with. Below is my first attempt and data visualization with Processing.
What am I looking at?
Basically I wrote a script that watches the TimesPeople Live Feed activity. Every time an activity occurs it checks to see if that article has a tree growing. If there is no tree it starts a new one growing and adds the user who performed the action to the new tree. If a tree already exists for that article then the user who performed the action is added to the existing tree. The more users the larger the tree. The trees also have a decay aspect to them. Every ‘x’ minutes if no activities are done for a tree (article) then the leaves start to go bad. At the same time each user has a certain life span for each tree. Each time a user hits that life span they’re dropped and the tree withers/shrinks.
The video above is a series of screens taken at 20 second intervals over about five and half hours. There is one issue with the video. The branches of the trees are drawn using recursion. When they got REALLY big my computer was taking longer than 20 seconds to render the image so those frames in the video pass faster than they should. (Some were taking up to 4-5 minutes.)
See it Live
If you want to watch it in real time, I exported from Processing to three different dimensions. Just click one of the links below. They’re a little different from the video. I reduced the branches split from 3 to 2. (I assumed people wouldn’t like it if I started their computers on fire.) They’re also missing the TimesPeople user images in the branches. This is a cross-domain limitation I think.
Where’s the Source Already?
Trying out github.
http://github.com/CaptPhunkosis/NYTimes-Article-Garden/
Show Some Love
Once last note: Not having used processing before, my initial prototype had some ghetto graphics. (I like to think they were quaint.) A shout out to all the people contributing on openprocessing.org. Looking at their examples helped me learn how to better use Processing.
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