Maria Mendez

En términos populares is a real-time language analysis of web-based content, and exploration of non-traditional visualization will provide a framework for revealing the often invisible links between the official discourse, media coverage, and the fluctuations of people’s individual perceptions on reality in the context of Colombia’s armed conflict.

The goals of my project are to first create a new way of viewing the use of the language in web-based social networks in Colombia and second, generate awareness about the potential of on-line participation as a new framework for different kinds of actions, ideologies, and social relations.

In the first phase of this project I used a custom concordance application to find the most used words and determine keywords. I’m using the RSS feeds of the main sections of the newspaper related with the conflict and mapping not just the number of times that a word is used but also the connections between words in sentences. As part of my further research for this project I want to explore different mediums in that the project can be made public.  In addition to web presence I want to investigate the possibilities of physically express the analysis of the information.

The first result of this research is a collaborative project with Ana Gutierrez, an installation in which the visitors are labeled via projection/video tracking with words that are part of the outcome of the text analysis that search for the most used terms to stigmatize civilians as part of the actors in the conflict.

Rama is a processing application that uses stochastic L-systems to generate a plant growth simulation that resemble hand made botanically precise illustrations.

Inspired by observations from botanical illustrations the projects aims to create a visualization of a natural process that is focus on the aesthetic of the representation with certain level of abstraction and not in a hyperrealist render.

Lindenmayer systems (L-systems) are mathematical descriptions of plant development that are used for generating realistic images of plants.

Built with Processing

The Paint Bucket Tool is a physical computing project in which I use an Arduino microcontroller and a 3-axis accelerometer to build a drawing tool.

The idea is to control an application build in processing changing the rate of the sound and the position, scale, and color of forms with the manipulation of a physical bucket. The programming map a spiral to the changes of velocity in the Y axis of the Paint Bucket Object and place circles which position, color and scale are determined by the change of the velocity in the 3 axis. The change in the speed of movement in the Y-axis also controls the rate of the sound.

At first I was using the MMA 7260Q accelerometer but I couldn’t get consistent numbers. One of the problems trying to use the circuit as a “shake” sensor was to be able to have “stable” connections and data. The MMA 7260 works only in very controlled situations. (Loose wires can create false signals )

Finally I end up working with a ADXL3xx acceloremeter.