(click image for full size)
This is the infectious handoff nature of ds106 that I love the most. While never really becoming the kind of musician who can truly “jam”, in a way we are doing this with ideas.
After posting the contorted how tos for my language tool, John Johnston commented on his own experimentation where we hooked together two web services in a new mashed up way. He pulled random quotes from the I <3 Quotes api and linking each word to a flickr search on each word (see John’s first test).
My suggestion was to make it so rather than present the results for each word, to display one word at random, with the idea to try and see how few images it might take to visualize the quote, even making it like Spell With Flickr where you can click anyone to get a new random image.
In about 24 hours he did so! Try it yourself at http://johnjohnston.info/tests/quote2.html and now it is an official ds106 assignment Visualize That Quote (tag=VisualAssignments312).
It is a work in progress, but John even added the ability to shuffle the picture order. My first attempt was:
(click for full size image)
My suggestions for more tweaking by John are:
- See if it can skip unnecessary words like “a”, “the”, “of”
- Be able to return a word if we accidentally click it closed
- Tweak the css for thr “attribution” link at bottom (sometimes overlaps the license text)
- Make it so when you hide the titlebars, it also hides the text of the words and the quote, to make it a true guessing game.
Of course none of this is necessary to make the assignment doable- that part is in exploring ways to represent words via photos.
For my first example, the photos for “dull” were not very litteral; they were more descriptive. And “immaculate” let to a lot of religious images. It is so random, so cool
ds106: I love this place
UPDATE (Not much later): John rolled in my suggestions! Here is a new quote for you to ponder as a visual:
(click for the full monty image)
Okay.
Think.
About.
It.
I really want to know when the likes of you and John Johnston would consider creating an open course around digital tool building. Please, please?
Such cool stuff!
I’m just a learner myself, MBS.
Alan, I am infected:
Enjoying this ping-pong immensely thanks for all the ideas.
Of course the code is now really horrible;-)
See if it can skip unnecessary words like “aâ€, “theâ€, “of†– doing some of these already, I’ll add to list of words to skip.
Be able to return a word if we accidentally click it closed -done: a simple restore all.
Tweak the css for the “attribution†link at bottom (sometimes overlaps the license text) done.
Make it so when you hide the titlebars, it also hides the text of the words and the quote, to make it a true guessing game. -added a switch for this.
Michael, I can only scratch the surface of this stuff, perhaps there could be some tweekable examples on http://jsfiddle.net/ or the like as ds106 assignments?
You rock, John Johnston, ping pong a code go.