Critical Computation
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Sousveillance Tool

Objective

Design and build a sousveillance tool in p5 that imports external JSON datasets.

Description

This week we will read an excerpt of Tactics and Poetics of Invisible Writing by Amy Suo Wu, which mentions the idea of sousveillance, a citizen tactic that monitors an activity of a corporation or a body of governance.

For Assignment #10, you are asked to find existing public APIs that host JSON datasets on the web, then consider how it might serve your interests of creating a sousveillance tool. Contexualize your intention and merit of being a citizen watch on the incoming data.

There are multiple ways to approach this assignment. For example, you can take a forensic appraoch and compare two datasets that document the same event and reveal new information through cross-comparing data. For example, we’ve talked about the discrepancies between U.S. census data versus Black Americans’ data collected by W.E.B. Du Bois and a group of Black students. Finding a way to compare and translate between these two datasets through a feminist data lens is one way to approach the assignment.

Another appraoch to this assignment is finding a way to reveal the voided, missing information – missing data is also a kind of information that can deliver tremendous meaning.

Please reflect on the materials we’ve covered in the entire semester, such as feminist data and consentful interface, and put consideration into the datasets you end up including in your project and how you're handling them.

Design Constraint

Canvas Size: 600 * 600

Timeline

Part 1 : Due 12/3

  1. Use Amy Suo Wu's definition of sousveillance as a guide and begin researching for publicly available API + JSON datasets for your project. Here is a place to start.
  2. Load the datasets into your p5 editor and storyboard three ideas for how the sousveillance tool is going to look / work.

Part 2: Due 12/7

  1. You will present your storyboards and datasets in Lab, then you will revise and polish your ideas based on feedback from CC faculty and peers.

Part 3: Due 12/14

  1. Complete your translation device in p5.
      2. On your CC portfolio page, please include the following:
    • Describe your design process. Include your three sketches and API sources.
    • A description for your sousveillance tool. What did you choose to monitor as a citizen watcher and why?

Submission Guidelines

Please submit your sketch to two places:

  1. Submit the sketch to the CC Lab class Canvas Assignment 10
  2. Add the sketch to your Critical Computation portfolio

Tutorials