The emerging art of data visualization, takes information and presents it in a graphical form, rearranging the data to express information in a more beautiful, interactive, or easily digestible way. Some of our favorite visualizations of late include a video game that visualizes American tax dollar spending, VJ Um Amel’s video remix of tweets from the Egyptian revolution, and an interactive map of the NYC Subway system. It’s even becoming recognized as a legitimate medium—upcoming Creators Sosolimited are notorious for their work remixing presidential debates.We think data visualization is significant because the artform takes data that might otherwise be overlooked—deemed uninteresting or confusing—and spins it in a way that people might find attractive and easier to interpret. This week’s Instructables How-To breaks down a project that assesses the average mood of a city from Twitter and displays the collected data on a laser-cut map according to geographical location. It reminds us of a combination of Julius Von Bismarck’s emoticon lighthouse and the Streaming Twitter Instructable from a few months back.For their Things That Think class, three students at the University of Colorado at Boulder made a 3D map of Twitter for their home state—though their technique can be applied to any region. The trio used multiple laser-cut layers of basswood for the map, and LEDs and an Arduino board to display happy, sad, depressed, or angry Tweets from cities around Colorado. Apparently, they even have a Bieber mode!Other materials you will need are a laser cutter, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, a topographical map of your state or country, wire, wire cutters, a soldering iron, and 10 4-pin connectors to plug in the LEDs.First, you’ll want to start with a high-resolution image that has topographical information on it (author suggests sourcing from Google Images). Open the image in Photoshop to give each elevation its own layer, before opening in Illustrator and converting to a vector file. You will feed this document to the laser cutter to tell it where to cut the wood.Then you will calibrate the laser cutter, and make your incisions layer by layer, gluing each successive layer to the one below it. Make sure to pencil in the holes for the cities on the back of the map, so you know where to put the LEDs.After you’ve cut each layer, then you need to program your Arduino, which you’ll use to assign a color to a specific city and import data from Twitter. After that, register a Twitter application and set up the Python Twitter Library to pull data from Twitter. Collect the longitudes and latitudes for each city you want to collect data from, and decide what information you want to display. In this case, the authors compiled a list of “happy” and “unhappy” words, which they searched for to rate a city on its overall mood.The final step is wiring the LEDs to the Arduino board. Test each LED first, and then wire a simple ground circuit since the Arduino drives too much current for a single LED to handle. Then you will solder the LEDs to the Arduino board and place the LEDs in the corresponding city’s hole. Now you’ll have your own tangible data visualization!Visit the Instructables How-To for further instruction, more detailed photographs, and tips on where to buy materials.
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