September 20th, 2012

emoto data sculpture

We just finished the documentation for emoto – a data art project visualising the online response to the Olympics London 2012.

In many ways, the crowning piece of the project, and a conceptual counterpoint to the ephemeral web activities, our data sculpture preserved the more than 12 million tweets we collected in physical form. We had 17 plates CNC-milled — one for each day of the games — with a relief heatmap indicating the emotional highs and lows of each day. Overlay projections highlighted individual stories, and visitors could scroll through the most retweeted tweets per hour for each story using a control knob.

The tweets and topics displayed in the installation can also be investigated in interactive heatmaps. Rollover the rows to see a tooltip display of the most retweeted tweet on the given topic at the respective point in time.

Thanks so much to my fantastic collaborators at Studio NAND, and Drew Hemment and the team at and around Future Everything and everyone involved!

Plenty-plenty Sentimenti!


Find a brief documentation at moritz.stefaner.eu/projects/emoto/

or read more on the project here:
nand.io/visualisation/emoto-installation
nand.io/visualisation/emoto
Article and interview on Creators Project
Data Stories podcast episode #11 with Stephan Thiel on emoto

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July 31st, 2012

emoto

A true mamooth project has finally launched: emoto.

Together with a huge team around Drew Hemment and Studio NAND, and a partnership with MIT Senseable City Lab, we aim at visualising the online reponse to the Olympic Games for the London 2012 Festival and Cultural Olympiad in the Northwest.

Basically, the idea is to track Twitter messages for content (which topics, disciplines, athletes etc they refer) to and emotional tone (are they cheering, swearing, being indifferent) and make that info available real-time on http://emoto2012.org, as a supplement or even alternative to traditional ways of consuming the Games coverage.

Our goal is to reveal both the big picture as well as the little anecdotes that make up the big, big stream of messages.

After the games, we will turn the collected tweets into an actual physical object, to archive these ephemeral little “things flying by” forever.

And during the games, we are posting insights and in-depth analyses (here is a first post on the Opening Ceremony), so there is also a little data journalistic angle to the whole package.

I have to say, this is probably one of the most ambitious projects I have worked on this far, and despite some small rocks encountered along the way, I am really happy how it turned out.. I hope you like it, too!