I've come across one of the most beautiful/sad/strange sites I've seen in a long time. Meet The Dumpster, a visualization tool whose data set is a collection of 20,000 breakups posted to Internet blogs during 2005.
Lev Manovich, at the Tate website, describes it thusly:
But if we simply limit ourselves to describing the work as it appears visually, we will miss the crucial characteristics of the social data browser constructed by Levin. We need to consider how the data presented in The Dumpster was obtained and processed before it was presented to us. Using a variety of methods, Levin and his collaborators have filtered the huge data space of online blogs isolating the postings from 2005 where teenagers narrated their breakups. The result was 20,000 postings describing 'confirmed' breakups. These postings were subjected to further analysis in order to derive various metadata about them: reasons for the break-up, who broke up with whom, the age and sex of the author, as well as their emotional state. Most of this metadata was not explicitly contained in the postings but is inferred with a high degree of probability by the project's authors.
Written in Processing, a programming language designed specifically for visualisation and CG, and targeted at people who aren't necessarily proficient at programming but have god-like data sets, it's one of the most clever uses I've seen of the language.
Some of the excerpts include winners like:
- 01313
- Larchie thinks Bad Religion is better than Fugazi, so I broke up with her. Then she played Sublime.
- 01503
- My former boyfriend broke-up with me because I told him I couldn't have children. I fantasize daily about tracking him down and somehow secretly poisoning him so that he will be rendered sterile.
- 03315
- ok me and my girfiend recenty broke up ya see i think it was cuz we have diferent signs see im a sagitarius and she was a whore tune in for next weeks;)
There's some powerful stuff in here. There's also some really trite whining and an awful lot of 14 year old emos with bleeding hearts pinned to their sleeves, looking up at the sky and crying out "God, why me?"
Note that running the visualizer will require that you have Java on your machine, as that's what the Processing language's runtime runs in.
