yoonyouk-lookingoutwards-07

This week’s looking outwards I focused on the work of Periscope, a company that focuses on data collection and visualization. Their goal is to send a message to their audiences and engage the public. Their visualization of data is very unique and provides a creative outlook data trends. For example, in data collection titled, “Most Negative Inaugural Speech in Decades.” I thought this data collection was unique in many ways – one being that they made quantitative data of facial expressions. Microsoft API was used to detect facial expressions while the presidents were speaking. A unique algorithm must have been crafted in order to detect facial expression and then determine whether it is positive or negative. They then combined all of the emotions into an arc like formation, creating a feather-like graph.

Rather than taking a typical approach of data visualization, such as a bar graph of a pie chart, the designers utilized a unique shape that still represented the appropriate data. When clicking on the individual strokes of the feather, users were able to detect the specific feelings felt during the speech.