Week 7

I believe that the key difference between movies and theater is that the audience can control the movie as it is pre-recorded, but theater is a live production. Whether or not technology is included does not change this description.

Although some people believe that technology turns theater into a sort of psuedo-cinema, where the quality of the performance isn't as good as either a traditional theater performance or cinematic film, I believe that technology can be used to enhance the production and make a more interesting live performance. One example of this is  the use of projectors can be very useful because it can produce moving images while the actors in the play perform. Overall, I believe that the use of digital arts can enhance the production value of any medium and add a layer of interactivity to make a more immersive experience for the viewer.

Week 7 Experiment

For my experiment, I decided to look at gender diversity in the CS Department. For my dataset, I took the text of all of the students who are TA's this semester and classified them as either male or female based on their names. Below are the results.

Figure 1. # of TA's by gender for each course level

Figure 2. # of HTA's by gender for each course level

Figure 3. # of HTA's by CS Field (Upper Level courses only)

In figure 1, we can see that for intro level courses, there are an fairly even number of male and female TA's. However, in intermediate and upper level courses, there are almost double the number of male TA's compared to female TA's. In non-concentrator courses (cs0020, cs0030, cs0100) there are slightly more female TA's than male TA's.

I then wanted to take a look at gender diversity for the head TA's. There are significantly more male TA's and female TA's for intro and upper level courses, but the male-female ratio for intermediate and non-concentrator courses are fairly even (3:2 and 2:4 respectively).

Since the differences in male TA's to female TA's was so high, I decided to look at the different fields of CS to learn more about why this may be the case. I discovered that there were significantly more men than women in AI/ML courses (43 men to 12 women). There are also almost double the number of men in theory courses. Thus, ML/AI and theory courses at Brown seem to more more male dominated compared to other field in Computer Science.

I thought this project was really interesting and sheds some light on how the Brown CS Department is doing in terms of gender diversity. For a future project, it would also be really interesting to plot similar data, taking race into account.

Week 6

Experiment

My experiment can be found here: DLA Experiment - Week 6
My experiment is a blend of language and code related to Halloween and Spooktober!
Readings

I thought "Opinions of my Own" was a really cool Chrome Extension and a great idea. I feel that in today's society, many companies and other entities are harvesting our data for their own purposes. I believe that, as a society, we do not fully appreciate the importance of our digital data/privacy, which allows third parties to gather our information and invade our personal privacy. I hope that more people will be aware of how important their data is and take more measures to protect it.

I think that language becomes data when the original meaning/intent of the language becomes stripped away. For example, a person's twitter account gives them a means of expression. However, if someone is scraping their tweet history, each tweet is just another data point rather than a form of language.

I believe we can ethically use online textual data by only using public sources where the user(s) agree that their data may be used. In these cases, the user should be fully aware of how their data is used and the person using their data must explicitly tell the user(s) what data they are using and how they are using it.

Week 5

Experiment

My experiment can be found here: https://jramos70.github.io/week5/experiment.html. My project is called Elon-spirational Quotes and it displays various Elon Musk quotes in 3D. The three keywords I thought of while making this project is change, non-static, and pop out.

Readings

I thought that Course in General Linguistics was an interesting read as it says that speech and sound alone do not have any meaning; it is the shared experience(s) between two individuals that allow those things to have meaning. I think that makes sense as someone who speaks English cannot effectively communicate with someone who only speaks Spanish because they do not have the shared experience of speaking the other's language.

Related to the above idea of what defines meaning in a language, Mez Breeze fuses "English, poetic conventions, programming code, contemporary social commentary, and online communiqué". Although parts of the language can seem foreign to certain viewers, people with a background in any of those subsets of the language will be able to understand those portions of the text. It is there past experience(s) that allow them to interpret the meaning of Mezangelle.

Week 4

Experiment

My experiment can be found at this link: https://jramos70.github.io/week4/experiment.html

My experiment was to take 4000 Elon Musk tweets and 4000 Donald Trump tweets and use Markov chains to mix their style of tweets. I chose Elon and Trump because they are two very active twitter users who usually tweet about very different topics, so I thought it would be interesting to see how their styles would mix.

Readings
TextRain seems like a really cool use of Augmented Reality and it is cool how the words dropping actually form a poem rather than random letters. Stream of Consciousness had a similar idea, except the words move in a stream rather than fall down vertically. Additionally, the artist can control how the stream moves. It is cool to see how two similar ideas get modified to make each art piece unique.

I would like to try out Curved out of these three art pieces the most because it seems very engaging. The mix of audio and visuals would make the experience really immersive.

For me, these 10 keywords make 3D text different from 2D text: Immersive, engaging, active, moving, change, different, physical, non-static, realistic, pop-out. When approaching a piece of language art in 3D, I would see try to visualize how the piece would be in 2D and think about how different the experience would be. Additionally, I would also try and think about "why" the artist decided to use 3D instead of 2D (what are the benefits or pros/cons). I also want to think about how my other senses are affected by the 3D piece (like in Curved where the audio changes the experience).

Week 3

Experiment
My experiment for this week can be found at this link: Experiment. My experiment name is "Fun Balls" and it creates a new ball every time the user clicks inside the canvas. My inspiration for this project was screen savers on computers.

Readings

I found the bot or not website to be quite fun and found that it was hard to determine whether or not a poem was written by a bot or person. I feel that since the bots are programmed by humans, in a way, the poems are still "human-written". This could be potentially why it is hard to distinguish human and bot written programs.

I thought the context free grammar was interesting because it formalizes a way to create sentence structures. It also makes me wonder if the bots used in "bots or not" uses this structure or if they use a grammar-free structure. Additionally, if personal home assistants like Alexa use these language rules, does it make it easier or harder for them to interpret improper grammar or slang from users?

In "Digital Oulipo", it was interesting to read how early practitioners of digital language arts used math to form literature and poems. Coming from a quantitative background, I always thought of math and language arts to be quite separate as math relies on logic whereas art is more free-form and emotional. Thus, it is pretty cool to see how art is created through a mathematical process.