Data Portraits

The long-term goal of the project is to develop a series of visualizations of people based on their digital data. (See http://vivatropolis.com/judith/papers/DataPortraits.Siggraph.Leonardo.pdf )

This project will focus on portraying Twitter users. The goal of the project is to create a visualization that gives the viewer a more intuitive sense of the interests of a Twitter user and their role in the community.

The first stage of the project is data collection:

• writing the code to download a given user's tweets
• download the tweets of those they follow
• summarize who follows their followers
  • how many followers they had
  • how many they were following

The second part of the project is visualization:

• designing and coding an evocative, legible and visually appealing representation of this data
• topic-modeling and other NLP analysis of the subject's postings
• recommend using Processing, but open to other suggestions

Key skills:

• linguistic analysis
• graphic design and animation
• database management

Mentor: jdonath@cyber.law.harvard.edu

General Questions: berkmancenterharvard@gmail.com