Python Archives - Page 2 of 2 - ross spencer :: exponentialdecay.digipres

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.