Passive Observation

Earlier this week, I took a look at the
TED Talk presented by
Jonathan Harris
, creator of the programmed-art installations
WordCount,
10×10,
Phylotaxis,
We Feel Fine, and
several more, including his most recent
project, Universe. Universe, like
most of Harris’ work, presents a more dynamic and aesthetically lively interface
for encountering large samples of texts, such as news feeds from all over the
world, collections of blog entries, or the British National Corpus.  No
question Harris’ projects stand apart from nearly everything else I’ve seen
online where sizeable corpuses are rendered visually. I mean that these projects
are created in such a way that they lead with artfulness, enriching data
visualization with aesthetics.

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