Over the past week, I've started adding the narratives to my case studies. While the timing of the animations still needs to be worked out, I'm pleased with the way the infoboxes are looking. I've added at least one box to each timeline, but still have much more to flesh out.

 

Below: examples of the stories in progress

 

A key takeaway from last week was that the way I'm representing the data is not meaningful in as far as some dots represent just one plant sighting, but many represent the observance of acres of invasive plants. The total land invaded is available in the data, and that is what I'll use, but it first needs to be cleaned up and made uniform. In some cases, square meters or square feet are used rather than acres.

 

I've solidified my ideas for placing this work in a physical space. (The final work will be shown at the Gray Area Theater on August 26th.) For a long time, I felt my ideas about taking the project out of the two dimensional space of the screen were good, but entirely disconnected. I was planning on using a proximity sensor to light LEDs as visitors drew near the piece, but this idea seemed disjointed-- I wasn't sure what it had to do with the website I was building. This week the idea came up that I might not use a sensor, but instead activate the LEDs based on what my data was doing on the screen. I like this approach and am going with it. I'll set up a websocket that runs through node.js to control an Arduino with LEDs. Additionally, many colleagues reiterated that they would like to see the physical plants in the space, and so I've decided to go with the idea of using MaKey MaKey to convert plants into triggers. Each species will serve as its own start button for the on-screen animation.