Scripts & Screenplays

Scripts

Scripts have a variety of applications with regard to narrative/image:

• Process the pixels of a video [1]
• Assistant editor: Generate one or more edits,
• Respond to (live) input (data, user interaction)
• Assemble various forms of data to create new narratives

Examples of data-driven drama

From text to video...

• I love alaska, "The heartbreaking search history of AOL user #711391"
• Videogrep Subtitles + Search = Automatic Edit
• Epicpedia, by PZI alum Annemieke van der Hoek

Epicpedia

A wikipedia article:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_theatre
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Butte_Creek

and its history:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Epic_theatre&action=history
• http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Little_Butte_Creek&action=history

Wikipedia has an API

• About the API
• The API itself

Every Mediawiki (by default) supports the API:

• http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/mediawiki/api.php

Etiquette

API

URL Structure:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php
 ?
 titles=Epic_theatre
 action=query
 rvlimit=10
 prop=revisions
 format=json
 rvprop=user|timestamp|content|comment

becomes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?titles=Epic_theatre&action=query&rvlimit=10&prop=revisions&format=json&rvprop=user%7Ctimestamp%7Ccontent%7Ccomment

JSONView

Browser extensions that specifically handle JSON are handy!

http://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/jsonview/

JSON Response

Twitter

http://dev.twitter.com/

• Searching twitter

RSS

http://sociable.co/social-media/twitter-hasnt-killed-rss-just-yet-heres-how-to-find-your-twitter-feed-rss-url/

Welcome to the new API

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/faq#10659 October 2012

Bad Authentication data

https://api.twitter.com/1.1/search/tweets.json?q=%23man

Rules of the Road

https://dev.twitter.com/apps/new October 2012

Anatomy of a tweet

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/this_is_what_a_tweet_looks_like.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

API Shift

http://automatist.org/blog/2012/09/08/youtube-who-tags/

Alternatives to APIs

• RSS Feeds (when available)
• Scraping

Assignment

Without using code, find a feed/data API of interest and make a mockup/prototype using (solely) the data it contains. The emphasis here is to focus on revealing something interesting in the data that is not necessarily evident in a public / "normal" view of that same data. On the basis of your mockup, you will then make a plan for realizing the sketch in code in the coming week.