ashleyc1-Section C-Looking Outwards-07

 

History Flow (2003) is a project by Fernanda Viegas in collaboration with Kushal Dave and Johnathan Feinberg which calculates and visualizes the changes of wikipedia articles. They calculated the changes by using tokens, or html tags in their program sentences to compare and capture changes in the articles. Although I don’t have access to the details, the Fernanda Viegas collaborated with IBM researchers. Their software was also able to determine who and at what age the author of the changes was and visualized these variants with different colors and sizes. Any time there is a black space, this indicates the article was vandalized or parts were blacked out which brings a lot of political undertones when seeing it in the context of a abortion wiki article.

This project is interesting because it brings up questions about censorship and the freedom to alter and edit text on a platform that is often referenced for the general public. From a visual standpoint, it’s also interesting to see the designs change and deviate significantly from the initial pattern and makes you think about what sort of conflict was going on and at what point can two (or more) authors of different opinions on a topic come together and agree what information is a determined fact to include in the article.

Artist Page:

http://bewitched.com/historyflow.html

Papers Written About Process:

http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/papers/history_flow.pdf

http://hint.fm/papers/wikipedia_coordination_final.pdf