Last week, we were to add a layer of polish to one of the three assignments (log self, log environment, log computer). I opted to add something to the third piece by analyzing more words and visualizing that. In addition to counting my logged keys for a week, I used eclipse to count words from my ITP blog entries. The results were a little dry, but surprising in quantity and range. (I came across some interesting sites including wordnet). I also uploaded my data sets to a fellow ITPer’s thesis project site called openvisuals. While the visualization options did not fit my data as nicely as I would have liked, I thought this stringed pie chart worked ok (it’s interactive on the site itself).
What I was thinking about more so though was a final project — how I could really get into the core of the course and produce something both engaging and tangible. The ideas I brought to the class seemed like a fog in my mind, but the discussion that resulted helped me to choose a direction to take. In short, I want to be able to extract my thoughts, steadily, with minimal effort, and minimal immediate intention. Why? I’m not sure exactly, but I’m thinking about quality of life and self awareness. The assignments so far have given us several different perspectives and data that I haven’t really seen before, but the most subtle things and perhaps most interesting things are the ones that aren’t explicit, aren’t communicated, and perhaps require the most digging to reveal. In my case, my dreams and internal monologue / haze would be great to see and experience outside of my head — being able to measure from excitement, to confusion, to depression, to critical analysis, etc. Not only would it be enlightening in and of itself, but it would have numerous practical applications. It could maybe take journaling or therapy to a new, private, empowering level.
The plan was to record my thoughts through voice (since writing or typing requires more labor and possibly more intention). Then I would try to process the voice with two kinds of software: 1) transcription (content) and 2) stress analysis (abstract). The plan seemed challenging but great.
Reporting back: I checked out an m-audio kit from the equipment room, recorded several streams of thought, and saved them as mp3 files. Meanwhile, I read-up on transcription software and found MacSpeech for OSX (equivalent to Naturally Speaking). I installed this and began using it to dictate. My laptop’s internal mic is messed up, so I borrowed a snowball mic from the equipment room to train the software to recognize my voice. It works well, but getting the software to transcribe from the mp3 files is the technical problem I’m experiencing now. I’m using soundflower and line-in to redirect the audio in and out, but MacSpeech won’t seem to allow me to apply the settings from one profile to another… I haven’t touched any stress analysis software yet, but seems this will be the more complicated of the two even. Another issue is that a large portion of the thoughts I’d like to see would not be able to be spoken, because of my environment, whether it be another person, a group, a shower, train noise, etc. While the potential of this project is highly attractive, I’m not sure it’s going to be feasible.