Amy Guy

Raw Blog

Monday, November 05, 2012

Remediating the Social #elmcip

I spent the last few days in Edinburgh College of Art, helping out at the Remediating the Social conference.  I was in charge of making sure everyone's microphones were on, and slides were being projected, which turned out to be more work than anyone anticipated.  Only minor hiccups occurred though, usually when I unplugged something I shouldn't have by accident.  I couldn't have done it without my glamourous assistant José, who was the master of fiddling with Macbook screen resolutions to make them play nice with the projector.

More importantly, I saw some super interesting talks, and met and talked to some fantastic smart people about electronic literature, and other things.

I also presented about Palimpsest, in front of the biggest audience I have ever talked in front of.  Go me.

Videos of everything from the conference are here.

On the last day I implemented an idea that had been kicking around the back of my mind for a while, which was the Uninformative Twitter Wall, or Twitter Squares.  It's nothing particularly complex; it uses jQuery and probably has memory leaks.  I'd love for people to help themselves to the code and improve it. Converting a hash of a tweet text into a hex code, I generated coloured squares for the results of a search term.  If the feed you choose is updating a lot, then the squares move around quickly and it looks pretty funky.  If there are only occasional new tweets, then it looks less exciting, but is still equally useless for seeing what people are saying.  (Unless you hover over the squares).  That's okay though, because it's Art.