Twitter Archives - ross spencer :: exponentialdecay.digipres

Turning NASA Wake-up Calls into data

For a while back then I was into space flight again. Scientists, science communicators, and engineers were all excited for a new era of rocket launches and the potential unification of the human race as we look towards the future.

During that time I discovered Colin Fries’ work in the NASA History Division to document all NASA “Wake-up calls”. A wake-up call is simply a piece of music used to wake astronauts on missions, a different piece of music, daily, for the duration of the flight.

Take, for example, the last Space Shuttle mission (Space Transportation System) STS-135; it was in flight for 13 days, and the wake-up call on day one was Coldplay’s Viva la Vida, while on day 13 it was Kate Smith singing God Bless America.

As a huge music buff who has the radio or music television on 18 hours a day, I really wanted to delve into this further. While Colin’s work is great, it’s just a PDF file (@wtfpdf). A PDF is not an ideal file format for querying data and gleaning new insights. So, while I wanted to explore it, I first decided to turn it into a true dataset. The result was a set of resources, a website, a JSON, a CSV, and an SQLite database which are each more functional and more maintainable over time.

Lets take a look at the results and https://nasawakeupcalls.github.io below!

What I will miss about Twitter

People seem to be moving. You’ll find me on Mastodon and BlueSky.

As I happened to be looking through some 2015 archives today, I made notes of the things I will miss.

twitter walls twitter sentiment analysis twitter graphs twitter bots twitter history and its use for activism twitter history and its use for emergent trends twitter knowledge base and advance search twitter serendipity

The history books will be pretty unbelievable when they come to write about it. It may never come back, but it did exist. And it was fun, not until it lasted, because it lasted too long, but until it was no fun no more.

Rendition of Mondrian: Composition with Grid 1 from the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, remixed by the Painter Goblin

The Painter Goblin Visits The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: Top Five

I’m heading to Houston for the first time this Friday, for ten-days. I can’t wait! To fill my time before I go, I thought I’d pay tribute to some of the artwork I might find there. Well, I say me, but I mean, I asked The Painter Goblin to make these pieces for me based on what it could find on wikidata.org. I like what it discovered!

Enjoy!

Two Cats, by John Singer Sargant and remixed by The Painter Goblin. The original can be seen at The Metropolitan Museum in New York

The Painter Goblin Visits The Met’s Top Ten

Inspired by a Creative Commons (CC) blog the Painter Goblin decided to tackle the top-ten visual artworks at The Met Museum (July 2017).

The blog discusses how folks are using CC search to find works held at The Met. The Painter Goblin has been using Wikidata to similar effect – an exploration – a technique grounded in happenstance to discover and understand art held in the fantastic list of institutions that make it available on the Wikidata/Wikimedia service. With little exception, The Painter Goblin cannot replace the original works but hopes that visually interesting/stunning remixes when they appear inspire others to indulge in their own discovery and works of creation.

Let’s see what our elusive basement goblin did with the top-ten listed above…

The Painter Goblin: Part 5, And Finally…

The work on the Painter Goblin is almost complete for now. The automation of their work is pretty much ironed out with regular tweets happening every night.

A recent favorite:

Maria Krzymuska — Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q28727544

I just wanted to round off this series of blogs with some remaining thoughts.

The Painter Goblin: Part 4, Putting it all together…

Following the previous posts, bringing this all together meant three different applications.

paintergoblin.py – creates the images, can be run standalone
wikigoblin.py – retrieves data to tweet from the Wikidata SPARQL services
twittergoblin.py – tweets for us! Either a random Wikidata image or from am existing Wikidata link

We create Tweetable information using the wikigoblin. We perform the Tweet using twittergoblin. In between the paintergoblin has to create his art!

We’ve seen examples of the images from the original zine.

How do we turn this concept into something real, and automated?

The Painter Goblin: Part 3, Data Sources

One thing that held the Painter Goblin project back was finding a data source to get images from.

There are potentially hundreds of sources out there, but! The path of least resistance means that:

Any source needs either hackable URIs** (uniform resource identifier) or a randomizing function.
Ideally, a data source doesn’t link to yet-another-page, e.g. portal like websites to other’s collections.
Ideally the data source links directly to an image to download.
Data can be easily selected by category, e.g. just paintings, or posters, not just ‘art’.

** A hackable URI is a URI pattern that can be cycled through using computational techniques, even if the underlying data isn’t entirely well-known. E,g, http://example.com/image/0001, http://example.com/image/0002, for subsequent pages, for lack of a more concrete example.

I wanted to explore heritage sources such as Europeana, TROVE, DPLA. I struggled to search these effectively though, and struggled to see how I might automate using them. I recognise they have APIs. I’ll revisit them in the future as I look to expand the Painter Goblin’s corpus.

Enter Wikidata.

The Painter Goblin: Part 2, Twitter Pieces

Continuing the story of the Painter Goblin and following part one, the idea of a Twitter bot started to form earlier this year.

The Painter Goblin: Part 1, The Zine

In part 2 I take a very brief look at what is needed to write a bot and get it publishing.

Learn more below.

The Painter Goblin: Part 1, The Zine

I wrote a new Twitter bot two weekends back: The Painter Goblin.

The Painter Goblin was inspired by a Zine I wrote in a different time, in 2015 for the Christchurch Zine festival, New Zealand.

The Zine itself was inspired by a story I had heard a few weeks earlier from someone who had seen this story on Reddit:

Every time I play the Sims, I start my family with a ‘painting goblin’.

I make him/her morbidly obese with green skin. I make sure to give him the following traits:

Likes to be alone

Lives art

Hates the outdoors

The first thing I do once I have enough money, is build a small room in the basement, send him down there, and then remove the stairs. I set him up in a tiny little area with only an easel, a toilet, a refrigerator, a bed, a shower, and a trash bin.

All he does all day is paint. That’s it. He paints and paints and paints.

Eventually his paintings become very good and worth a lot of money. Every few minutes I go downstairs and sell whatever painting he has finished and then I return to playing the game.

My family always ends up feeling blessed because of their fortune, and they never find out about the horrible secret living beneath their home.

Lets take a look in more detail below.