Research

One of the perhaps neglected areas in the development of my Project is research. AS my Project went through fairly radical changes (from making music from tweets to a studio of semiotics sourcing content from the internet) I always felt I needed just a bit more work done to move ahead to the testing and review stage. In someways this development process was a bit hectic but I can't say I didn't learn from it, I've had to use Flash, OSC, Twitter API, PHP, Javascript and jQuery to get to where I am.

Finally happy at getting good results from my piece I did some testing. The feedback was invaluable to say the least. Although I had explained the concept about the piece, that the meanings are not always the meanings you apply the users commented the Layout was too confusing. They suggested making it look more like a news site, so that's what I've been working on. They also suggested putting in suggestions as they were not sure exactly what sort of results to go searching for to yield interesting results.

I worked on implementing these changes. One of the tasks I had to do was research what terms yielded interesting results. As the data is being pulled dynamically these results might vary but after a few days even though some change they still yield the best results. The terms searched and there results are thus:

Monkey, lol, DJ, Hurling, Jam, Dance, GAA, Sing, Robot, Recession, Opera, Dalek, Balincollig, Rock, Tony, CIT, War, NFL, Happy, Guitar, Baseball, Surprise, Cute, Russia, Germany, Guitar solo, Bluegrass, Folk, Arab, Osama, Cool, RockNRoll, Fun, Kids, Coda, Libya, Bailout, Taoiseach, Crash, Whisper, Hanut, Style, Chocolate.

As well as this it was suggested that the image results be spruced up, to make them more visually appealing, the idea is that this would be projected while the comp would display the mainly text, along with an image, this image was originally a collage of the results but testing showed this as confusing. Instead the images are shown on top of each other and when a user clicks, they see the next in the results. The image search can be seen here, it might not suit all screen sizes as it is being developed for use on only one screen.