For my second computing and the arts assignment, I was supposed to make a collage in homage to the famous dadaist collages of the early 20th century. In particular, I chose Hannah Hoch's Cut with the dada kitchen kitchen knife through through the last weimar beer belly cultural epoch in Germany. (Or something. Apparently there are variations on the translation of the name of the piece.)
Hoch's collage features the heads of numerous public figures cut and pasted into strange and seemingly nonsensical contexts. Because so much of the collage consists of material drawn from current events, I decided to imitate that in my collage by drawing all my images from trending google image searches. Since I did this in early October of 2011, I quickly discovered that by far the most common image searches were for young female celebrities and the recently-deceased Steve Jobs. Strictly speaking, this isn't really a data visualization, as I chose freely among the top ten or so trends, which increased the diversity of the images.
I also noticed that Hoch's piece frequently included clippings from newspaper headlines about dadaism, the very movement to which she belonged. I peppered my collage with the word “data” in a similar matter. That was mostly just to be silly.
One of the reasons I thought of creating my collage over a map is that Hoch's collage actually incorporated a map. Her map, however, was an infographic of Europe showing which countries had the most progressive policies on women's rights. If I had a chance to rework this collage, one thing I'd like to do is integrate some kind of visualization of electronic freedom around the world. One possibilities might be to present visual elements more sparsely in parts of the world where internet access is heavily censored. Unfortunately, it would be hard to distinguish this from regions where results are sparse for other reasons (developing nations, and regions that don't use google as much). Another possibility would be to do something based on each nation's laws on copyright and software patents. Like the move toward increased gender equality that was taking place during Hoch's life, I believe that more progressive laws in regards to internet censorship and software patents would eventually lead to greater freedom and perhaps even an economic boom.
I don't really have the skills to do it yet, but another cool thing to do would be to code up a map like this that actually pulls live data from google trends and visualizes it on demand. If I were to do that, I'd probably use a vector map based on national borders rather than a satellite image like I did here. I wonder if I could do something with the Google Maps API...
The images in the collage are drawn from Google Image Search Trends for the first two weeks of October 2011, and correspond (roughly) geographically with the areas map on which they are arranged. For example, in Russia, trending image searches included Yandex, Steve Jobs, Trollface, Emma Watson, and Minecraft.
US: Steve Jobs, black girls, Hope Solo, Sarah Palin
Canada: Justin Bieber, Natalie Portman
South America: Cristobal Colon, Miss Universo, Virginia Gallardo, and Nick Jonas
Northern Africa: Boko Haram, Ronaldo
Central/Southern Africa: Ramadan, Beyonce, Amy Winehouse
Western Europe: Steve Jobs, Jodie Marsh, BMW, Teresa Fidalgo
Northern Europe: Steve Jobs
China: Steve, Liu Yan, Aoi
Saudi Arabia: Blackberry
India: Pooja Bedi
Pakistan: Salman Khan (not the one from Khan Academy, apparently)
Australia: Smurfs, Ryan Gosling
Malaysia: Randy Pangalila
New Zealand: Dan Carter
