I finally installed the PageOneX real size project with stories related to guns, wars and terrorism. Come visit the display this week to the second floor of building E14 at MIT Media Lab. Thanks all of you that helped in this process: Adrienne, Luis, Álvaro, Nacho and Matjaz!
What follows is a photographic guide to the PageOneX real size installation.
You’ll not find Washington Post or LA Times in Boston news stands. It’s so difficult to get the paper!So, I had to subscribe to the Washington Post and LA Times by mail. They will be arriving more than a week later after the publication date.Newspapers are heavy and are folded. We put some books to try to have flat sheets.Cool idea, put newspapers front pages in bags… but this model was too thin plastic and didn’t passed the test. Although not all newspaper are the same width, I decided to buy one size bag for all of them. I had to buy 1,000, do you need some?These are the right plastic bags… and they are full of surprises (insect and spiders from another era). Besides, they are super-slippery objects, impossible to grab.First thing is to put every front page in its bag. Thanks Adrienne for helping!Nice and ready, every front page is now in a bag.We were using the previous digital analysis that we had made with PageOneX.com to help us with the coding. We’ll find in the process multiple small news that we had skipped!We keep copy+pasting. Thanks Luis for helping! Foto: Luis Edgardo CottoFirst time we see a whole week coded. Foto: Luis Edgardo CottoWhile coding you can find amazing things: people cheering in the front and last page.
That’s how the table looked like when we were finishing the process of manual coding. Thanks Nacho for helping! We coded all the news related to the Boston Marathon bombings as terrorism (yellow) and also other bombings and news about terrorist. However, Why is Boston ‘terrorism’ but not Aurora, Sandy Hook, Tucson and Columbine? Worth mentioning that the Marathon bombings events also included shootings with guns. Are we wrong coding?A giant level: to look like we know what we are doing. Blue painters tape: the only tape we are allowed to use in the building. Álvaro, thanks for helping!Legend on the top left corner. We didn’t have to remove those Washington Posts… they never arrived, after several calls asking for them!That’s what you see from the MIT Media Lab Lobby.The Boston Globe is the third row from the top. It almost always have a small news about international war conflict in red (Korea, Afghanistan) and something about guns (guns control debate or shooting). NYT, second from the top, dedicates usually a picture above the fold to guns or wars.Example of a Guns/Wars pair in a New York Times front page.That’s how the installation looks like. From top to bottom: Washington Post, NYtimes, Boston Globe and LA TImes.You will say: -why are there missing papers? I will tell you: -This is a small data visualization, we show what we have. Sometimes data (newspapers) don’t arrive, so we don’t display them. In that sense the data visualization is showing the availability of the data: the first row (Washington Post) and in the bottom row (LA Times) you can see all the papers that didn’t arrived on time. I’ll be putting on the wall as soon as they arrive.Visitor number 3.Visitor recording the installation.Update 26.04.13: Uploading some LATimes and Washington Post that arrived this week.
