Project Duration: 1 week
Guide: Jacob Marsico, IDEATE Lab, CMU
What is the Project about?
This is an exploratory project based on the LED Light Wall outside the Carnegie Library. One of the most trending topics last year was the US Elections. As election day approached on the 8th of November, a lot of tweets were being generated by people, indicating their support for either Hillary or Trump. I mapped this support through some simple animations on the LED Wall.
Rationale
The US Elections have been a trending topic for almost a year now. With both candidates being controversial, the news and social media were rife with stories, facts and opinions of all sorts, and with the elections around the corner, people were taking to social media to show their support for the candidates.
We had Hillary Clinton on one side, representing the Democrats or the Left and on the other hand we had Donald Trump representing the Republicans or the Right. In the US, the two dominant parties: the Democrats and the Republicans are known as the Left and the Right respectively, as they have contrasting ideologies. That is why in most posters, one can see Hillary Clinton being shown on the left and Donald Trump on the right.
News channels and other organizations were constantly conducting polls to analyze which candidate is more likely to win.
As the people have been expressive in their support for the candidates on social media, there have been instances of visualizations using Twitter data to show the popularity of candidates.
The intention was to use twitter data to indicate which candidate is more popular or garnering more support on Twitter and create an abstraction in the form of animations on the LED wall outside Carnegie Library. The US Elections have been nothing short of a War, with each party/candidate and it's supporters trying it's best to overcome the other. The idea is inspired by a mix of different concepts.
The concept of "Twitter Twitter on the Wall" is an amalgamation of all these ideas into one. Using the twitter4j Java library on Processing, tweets are being queried for with definitive hashtags such as "Elections 2016" at frequent intervals. The string returned is being parsed for phrases like "VoteForHillary" or "VoteForTrump". Each time, there is a tweet in favor of Hillary, a sweep animation of LED lights is initiated from left to right, indicating a hurl of "Angry Birds" in the form of a tweet from the side of the Democrats towards the Republicans and vice versa. Thus, if one looks at the LED light wall, one can get an indication of the candidate having the upper hand, at least in the context of popularity in Twitter. And thus, extending the metaphor of the Magic Mirror to the LED Wall, one can almost inquire the probable winner of the Elections, "Twitter Twitter on the Wall..."
