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Project 1 Completed Proposal

Project 1 - Completed Proposal


Title: Experiments in Visualizing the News
Abstract:
Experiments in Visualizing the News is a web-based media work that seeks to provide insights and reflection on the functioning of the news media in our contemporary moment, over the course of a two week period during September-October 2017. Four different experiments involving news headlines--a visual comparison of four media outlets homepages, a documentation of personal news consumption, a video-based work of scrolling headlines, and a computer-voice reading of headlines and poems created from the headlines--are individually accessed through links on a single web page. Each of the experiments results in a different way of conceptualizing and experiencing the news headlines during the time period, and is situated within the media ecosystem of the United States.


Proposal:
This project is a series of web-based media experiments related to my investigation into the nature of the contemporary news media and will be designed in four phases. All four phases will be linked to through a single website that will host “Experiments in Visualizing the News” through Wix.com.
The home page is a blank white background with a title of the project and consists of four links to each of the four experiments. The minimal aesthetic is used for simplicity and also serves as a relief from the news media as the user clicks in and out of the four experiments.
Experiment I.  For experiment one, I will engage in an observation of the top stories as determined by four selected websites from the US News Media—that fit into four quadrants on a grid with the axes of corporate/independent and left/right. Through this process I will develop a visual diagrammatic display of how each website promotes or ignores a particular news headline as it occurs.  For purposes of this experiment, I have chosen the following outlets according to their closest fit to the grid taking into account comparable audience size and influence: CNN (Corporate-Left). (Note: CNN may also be considered moderate or even slightly right-of-center, but for the purposes of this project, it is clearly to the Left of Fox News). Fox News (Corporate-Right). Breitbart (Independent-Right), and Democracy Now (Independent-Left). I will place the screenshots of each of these four sites onto the grid within the same frame, and then save that as a new image. I will then upload these to a website, and allow a user to click through the week’s news headlines as seen on these four websites, in order to find his or her own individual observations, conclusions, and insights on how these four different ideological sites made their individual editorial decisions.


Experiment II. For experiment two, I will observe and record my own news consumption habits for a two-week period. I will save and take a screenshot of every news article that I read (having “read” defined as actively chosen to click on) through my own self-selected choices. I will create a written log and document each of these links, and transcribe the headlines of each article into a single text document. Experiment two will take the form of an Adobe Spark page that shows the screenshots of all articles sequentially as the user scrolls down the page. My intention is to seek a transparency in my own interests and biases through this process, as well as reveal stories that may not have been shown on the front pages of the websites from Experiment one.


Experiment III.  In experiment three of the project, I will transcribe the top headlines from each of the four websites that were used in experiment one, keeping four different running logs of all the headlines across each day.  I will reformat the text of each into one long sentence within a text box in Adobe After Effects. Through the use of the title roll, I will animate the text to roll across the screen, recreating the effect of a “ticker tape” bar as seen on television or in front of a TV studio. Each of the four websites’ text headlines will scroll in a different row at the same pace across the screen. The file will be exported out as a .mov file, be uploaded to Vimeo, and embedded into the website. The intention here is to reflect the sense of the overwhelming amount of events and information that has come across our individual news feeds over the course of the last two weeks, giving the viewer a difficult amount of information to process and allowing for comparison of the language of the different scrolls as they flow across the screen.
Experiment IV. The fourth experiment will be an experiment in visualizing the news through manipulating text, converting it into audio, and creating an image of the resulting audio wavelengths. First, I will take the text of all of the headlines I acquired through experiment two, and place that into an apple TextEdit document. I will use the Voice function to have a computer-generated voice read aloud all the headlines as one long sentence. Next, I will take all of the words of headlines, and use them as a depository from which to create three poems. One poem’s subject will be created from the worst of the headlines, one will include only the names of people and places included in each of the headlines, and one will be a re-creation of the headlines into a language of reclaiming power over them. This will be created by recording the audio of the computer generated voice, uploading those audio files into Adobe, and then exporting them into .mp3 files. Additionally,  I will screenshot each of the audio wavelengths, and upload the resulting audio and image files to an individual page, linked from the main site. In this experiment, by listening to the headlines read out loud shifts the viewer’s sensory and perceptual focus of the news consumption.


Background: how does this project relate to your ongoing work?
This project is an extension of my previous interests and studies in media, language, and current affairs, an attempt to use news media as art material, and a new form of my ongoing practice of documentation of my day-to-day observations, both subjectively and objectively. I believe that it is imperative to pay attention to how different outlets are framing various stories

Significance of your project:

Each of these experiments will attempt to re-contextualize the news headlines in different ways with various perceptual effects. Through daily documentation of selected media organizations, the first experiment seeks to raise some of the following questions: What outlets are directing our attention to a particular story and how are those related to the biases of the organizations and audiences? What politics is at work in determining the editorial decisions? What deserves our attention and for how long before another story takes over the top headline? The second experiment is focused on self-observation, and asks: what stories are occurring that do not make the top headlines? How do we determine what story is most important? How do we personally understand and process the amount of news occurring, before we forget, and what does the nature of our news media exposure do to our thoughts and emotions? The third and fourth experiments seek to alter our visual perception of how we see news headlines, and reflect a feeling of information overload and how we make choices of where to place attention. The project intends to leave the viewer reflecting upon how much agency we have in receiving news, how is language being manipulated within an objective story for an audience, and what the speed at which news is occurring is doing to our thoughts and emotions.

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