Multi-Headed · posted by vaibhav bhawsar Apr 23, 2007
Multi Headed Hydra Proto ~ a generative book
The idea that an autobiography can not only be of a person but also of data, ideas, concepts or other inanimate objects is of interest to us. We are interested in looking at how certain ideas have prevailed on the web over the years. Ideas of emotion, conflict, markets, networks and humor to name a few. The generative book is a narrative object that elicits such ideas/concepts/identities that have existed on the web for years and that which continue to be produced or appended to by people in present day cyberspace.
Why the form of a book?
The Internet is a fascinating source for content. Even more so since content today is generated by millions of people from certain parts of the world. Though the Internet and form it has taken is very different from that of a book- We are interested in re looking at one of the oldest methods of storing knowledge in the light of hypertext, networks, content syndication, concept databases such as WordNet and user generated content. In such a scenario what would a book such as this look like and contain? We are not only interested in what the book contains but also in how its content is generated and presented. For example the page of contents or narration is something we would like to revisit in a book like this.
What is generative about the book?
Every time the program is run it produces a unique book. No one book produced by this program is the same. It renders layouts, spreads, colours, type and other graphic elements depending on a set of relationships built from the queried data. The book is generated using an Idea as a seed.
What is this queried data?
The queried data would come from sites and search engines such as yahoo, flickr, craigslist, twitter, slashdot, wikipedia, open social networks, blogs, archives or the wayback machine to name a few. This would mean using open APIs and RSS feeds and some scraping wherever required.
Example:
The seed idea being “Love”
The program would start with concept search on LOVE using wordnet. It would query for hypernyms, hyponyms and synsets of the word LOVE. This is the phase where the program will expand the keyword by looking at its synonyms, antonyms and related words. This is essentially where we would like to create a context for querying information regarding the seed idea (in this case LOVE). Using the returned wordnet results the program would then query other sites using all its synonyms, antonyms, similar concepts.
Fabinfo updates · posted by vaibhav bhawsar Apr 04, 2007
These are some renderings of the milling assignment for fabricating info class where I was trying to use fields in maya to inflict changes on a NURBS surface. I was interested in blending two patterns/surfaces together to produce a third that had the geometry of both.
For my final I am trying to build a surface made of smaller units that react/change according to an external force such as wind. So the smaller units have an aggregate effect on the larger surface.
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opengarden · posted by vaibhav bhawsar Mar 30, 2007
Wordnet and Visualthesaurus · posted by vaibhav bhawsar Mar 21, 2007
I never knew that visualthesaurus was built around wordnet . Visualthesaurus presents a visual mapping of word relationships and presents an interface to navigate those relationships. In the beginning it was a free service but now they provide commercial options of this product.
You can choose to display Nouns, Adjectives, Verbs and adverbs and their in-between relationships.
At the visualthesaurus core these are the relationships that you can enable/disable to show on the map for your entered word.
I am not sure how each of these options map to the wordnet fucntions such as hypernyms, hyponyms, meronyms but here is my attempt at relating visualThesaurus functions/relationships with that of wordnet.
Is a Part of is —> Meronym – Something X is part of something Y. Paper is part of book. Ink is part of pen. Earth is part of the Milky Way etc.
Entails —> If you are doing X then you are certainly doing Y
or from wikipedia entry on wordnet
entailment: the verb Y is entailed by X if by doing X you must be doing Y (sleeping by snoring)
Verb-groups as coordinate terms: those verbs sharing a common hypernym (not sure)
Domain Category, Domain Region and Domain Usage all seem to some sort of hypernym and hyponym relationships
Here are some further explanations of the relationships I found on the visualthesaurus site.
FabInfo Milling Updates · posted by vaibhav bhawsar Mar 07, 2007
Milling updates: These are blendshapes created from two source plains under the influence of Air field.
OLPC Updates · posted by vaibhav bhawsar Mar 06, 2007
Enough being said about OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) am only going to provide links to interesting comments on/regarding the OLPC program headed by Nicholas Negroponte.
Shuchi Grover an Indian educator writes about OLPC and a few reasons why OLPC may have to re look the place it occupies in the Indian education milieu.
The $100 laptop
Here is one of Ethan Zukerman of GlobalVoices.org
Here you will find the OLPC News.
AboutYouMeEverything? · posted by vaibhav bhawsar Mar 05, 2007
So I wrote a google search based scraping program for the Programming A to Z midterm. The idea was to find as much as one could about a person through the internet. The scraping program would rummage through texts online and bring back every sentence in which your name appeared. So for example if you entered your name it would bring back to you all the sentences online which had your name in it. I initially intended this to work specifically on a social network- more in the spirit of bringing back all the conversations about you (or even someone else).
Fabricating Info surfaces · posted by vaibhav bhawsar Feb 28, 2007
Some first runs of plain surfaces under the influence of fields etc using Blender. I got better results while using mesh plains vs NURB surfaces.