How well does Tableau integrate into Squarespace?

Hm…so so. Never cared for the overly active zoom transition. WiP.

Natural Language is Unnatural for a Bot 🤖

😀😒😕😖🐍🐍🐍

I would be lying if I said that coding came to me easily. It’s been years of stepping back to square one, but it’s something with which I have pursued with continued tenacity because the thrill of getting something to work makes you forget the frustration of debugging.

I’ve managed to stick with Python as a programming language the longest because it suits my brain to learn a tool that can worth with visuals and mathematical functions. As I am continuing with the weekly Dear Data project, I find that I am drawn to unstructured data or metrics that captures qualitative information.

As usual, I aimed a little higher and stumble along the way. It's within these stumbling blocks, however, that the exploration happens. This week's project began with modeling my usage of text messages. I wanted to quantify how I was communicating using emojis – the frequency of usage, the time, length of messages, etc. in order to look at how effectively emojis communicate emotions.

That's enough questions to start a PhD. I've got seven days.

Lesson № 1: Not all unicodes are equal

Emojis varies vastly across operating systems, your iOS hamburger has a different stacking order than your Android burger. They could be have the same unicode but different IDE will read them differently. (I will have to look into this further.) Codes with emojis that have started in Drawbot will not work in Sublime and vice versa, even when running on the same Python version.

Not only will some emojis not look differently – Android used to convert and iOS cookie emoji into a cracker – but some are simply non existent across platform. 🥳 Party hat emoji, not universal. (I haven't even gotten into browsers yet.)

Lesson № 2: The effort may not be worth it (but you'll learn something)

After all this time testing and debugging to get my script to count emojis, the results were not that interesting. The emojis themselves were pretty expressive, for me to made a data viz drawing of it feels like it is flattening the information. Some of the more boring data I've collected in previous weeks yielded much more interesting visual. Counting emoji resulted in a not so complex data set.

Lesson № 3: It never hurts to review the fundamentals

I started looking at what other information I could extract from these messages, and how can I show something interesting without leaking privacy. One of the first thing I learned with the Hear Me Code group in DC is how to measure the length of a string. That way, I can start to see patterns of when and how long the messages were. (Exchanges with my sister read like novelas.) Responses with emojis were sufficiently short.

As with most things difficult, I made new discoveries along the ways. I had a chance to practice cleaning data. Extracting extraneous punctuations and spaces, and setting everything in lowercase because Python is case sensitive, so it will considers words at the beginning of a sentence a different piece of string than the same word in the middle of a sentence. In thinking what else this could be relevant for, I set out to write a script to import and read a text file, parse the string into separate words, and return the most used words! The most used word was "the". 🤦‍♀️

Solutions begets more problems, but I trekked through reviewing split and remove functions, loops and counters. Hooray! My top used words are "type," design" and "otherskillschemistry."

Another day....

Dear Data Week 51: Shit happens. Plans change.

I’ve attempted similar personal projects in the past, such as The Hundred Day Project, and there is always bumps in the road. In the beginning, I’m enthusiastic but still trying to build the muscle memories to make the activity a habit.

I had a low tech idea at the start of collecting fingerprints as a mark of measure for the people I meet. (Haha, security issues.) I would only ask friends to contribute – which makes it a bias measure – but the main problem was that I never remembered until the meeting was over. So all week, I had been walking around with an ink pad and gathering no fingerprints.

The other option was to follow the Dear Data guideline and draw my commute through public spaces. I had turned on Google Fit as a tracker, but the app had some built in data viz function that it became a creativity block.

Going back to the original idea of visualizing contacts, I decided to switch up the mark making tool as a means to get past creativity block.

I forgot what a pain in the ass watercolor is to work with.

Sure, it’s freeing in that it flows easily and creates interesting patterns through absorption patterns, but water tension is a difficult thing to manage. I’d imagine that there would be radiant bursts of colors but the result would be a booger of a blob. Fortunately, the more blobs I made, the better they became.

Type, Code and Data

Type, code and data are three topics that frequently float on the surface of my thoughts lately. Perhaps I’m trying to justify to myself, or am attempting to explain the connection should someone ask, that causes me to constantly think about the relationship between the three.

Then I came across this simple quote in Goeff Cox’s Speaking Code, quoting Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech, “Speech demonstrates agency.”

As a relatively quiet person, maybe these three pursuits are my way of finding a voice. Typography relates to the way a speech looks, the personality, approachability and tone it takes. Code is the structure, how is this speech built? What are the syntax and functions that makes it operate? And data is the justification for the the speech, why must we talk about this and what happens when our voices our silenced. So for me, these are the elements necessary for agency and therefore these seemingly unrelated topics are intrinsically connected.

Dear Data: Week 01

Week 01 or Week 52 if I were counting down.

Data science, or at least data collection, might be the best profession for someone with OCD tendencies. I’m hoarding data in the name of research. This week I drew my interaction with social media and emails, human interactions through digital touch points. I love seeing that patterns that arise of when I am most active, productive or board. Drawing the data takes the pressure off of accuracy and lowers the barrier of entry because I was not fighting a software to get the job done. In some ways, it was a little therapeutic because I had a mark making system in place so drawing the data became an activity of counting. As the week progressed, recording the data also nudge my behavior to disengage with social media. Looking forward to week 2 or week 51.