Today, we started off with a quick table round in which everybody described and reflected his findings from yesterday's work. We mostly focused on getting deeper into our topic and defining crucial further steps of the concept. Also many people planned their trips and prepared for surveys. After this round, we did another exercise, which focused on 10 ways of manifestation of our final work. This means we should think about the way of presentation and how we imagine your project to be an experience; what our statement will be that should be conveyed and how people should perceive our project.
I thought of these 12 ways and while doing, I strongly felt, that I have to let go the pure interactive digital visualization and dig deeper into a spatial realization, since it implies many adavantages that support the transfer of the statement much better.
Another input was to do research through Instagram to get a broader public to answer your questions. This will definitely be a way for me to expand my survey, as Instagram provides a broad target group with different interests and backgrounds and thus, different understandings of semiotic processes. For the afternoon, I was creating pretotype, a prototype of a prototype, of how my final work could look like.
PRETOTYPING
Corpus linguistics are characterized by the use of authentic language data, which are documented in large corpora. Such text corpora are collections of linguistic utterances that are put together according to specific criteria and with a specific research objective. The findings of corpus linguistics are thus based on natural expressions of a language, that is, on language, as it is actually used. These utterances may either have been written or may be spontaneous or elicited spoken language. Most corpora are in digital form today and can be used for linguistic research using specific software. The data set I am intending to work with is based on such corporas, in this case geographical positions of words sorted by countries. Noah Bubenhofer and his team already sent me a data set of geo collocations.
My approach fpr this pretotype is to plan the appearance of the spatial installation. Therefore I thought about a way of visualizing this geographical data. In the concept, I defined a center from which on the countries are going to be placed. The distance from this center is calculated by mapping the actual real distance onto the usable distances in the given space. The countries itself are created with MDF tiles and their size is also a mapping of their actual size. Their shape is generated through the length of their name. The longer it is, the more edges it can have. Irak for example would be nearly round, whereas Switzerland would be rather peaky. This can be realized with the help of parametric design tools such as Grasshopper.
Furthermore, the concept of computer vision can also be applied to this installation, since it helps to alter the appearance of the whole installation in real time. This will be used for the tiles to change their position according to a trigger. The maximum height can be the maximum value of the data and the minimum height can be the minimum value. The trigger can be voice or fiducials. In this case, the data are words, so a voice recongition can be implemented. To emphasize the linguistic character of the installation and create another channel of outputting the data, a sound could echo the word, that were used to trigger the installation.
In the digital web tool, there are colors refering to the type of words. This can also be realized by LED's, which change their color in real time according to the input.
