TweetCatcha seeks to uncover the organic nature of news as it travels through Twitter over time, by examining the movement of NY Times articles through Twitter. Nick and me worked on this project for our data visualization class and my AS3 class.

The New York Times Newswire API is used to load news for the last 24 hours. The title and URL for the retrieved articles are used to search for tweets with the BackTweets API, a BackType service.

The articles are placed around the center arranged clockwise based on the time they were published. The tweets for each article emanate from the article near the center to the outside. These are based on the time difference between when the article was published and when it was tweeted. The 24 rings indicate the hour difference from 1 near the center to 24 near the outside.

Data was collected between November 13, 2009 and February 9, 2010 via a cron job set up to pull and store the data locally. The current database is 107 MB, with 15,327 NYTimes articles and 311,885 tweets for those articles.

Demo

Presentation:

A video experiment with AS3 that uses Marilyn Manson’s “The Beautiful People” video. The code grabs the pixels from a specified area of the video and displays it in a 10 x 10 grid. You’ll need a good internet connection for this to play correctly.

A simple audio visualizer in AS3 for Porcupine Tree’s “Circle of Manias”. Crank up the volume!

Kanye’s Nightmare is a prototype for a game where Kanye needs to kill Taylor Swift zombies with a baseball bat. Use the arrow keys to move around and the spacebar to attack. If I develop the game any further I plan to include different weapons, more animation for the sprites, score and submitting highscores, maybe different levels and of course improved graphics.