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Final Project Statement

Final Project Statement             All the news we consume is controlled. News agencies and organizations decide what is worthy of making the news cycle and allow us to consume that information. We turn to the same news sources for our information – generally, ones that reflect our political beliefs and values. Consequently, we get stuck in an echo chamber. My final project is a dramatization of this experience.             In my project, I wanted to capture this experience, showing the audience that they do not have control over their surroundings and are passive recipients. A news article is randomly selected from a pre-curated list of news articles. The user enters a wormhole while a computer voice reads the article to the user. The wormhole changes colors as the sentiment of each color changes and the speed that the user enters the wormhole changes as well.             I made many design decisions as I was making my final project. First, I had to make a
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Final Project Update

While working on my final project this week, I spent time thinking about how much control the user should have over the experience. Ultimately, I decided the user shouldn't have any input or control over the experience because the experience is only given meaning if it is passive; it's indicative of the way we consume our news. We do not have a say in what news is reported to us. After making this decision, I experimented with a few concepts: 1) I considered allowing the user to input an article, allow them to choose from an assortment of articles, or random select an article to be read to the user. I ultimately decided to randomly select an article to be read to the user because it best matches the passive experience I want to create - as I described above. 2) The second consideration I had was giving the audience time to prepare, so the website would prompt the user to click a button to enter the experience. After trying this idea and asking people for feedback, I decided
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Final Project Update

I made a good amount of progress on my final project. I scraped all the articles from the Brown Daily Herald and used a sentiment analysis classification tool to assign each of the articles a score (https://github.com/aanshshah/dla_final_project). Next, I started the scene that I am going to be using for the project in a-frame. I created a 'wormhole' and the article text is read to the user via a text to speech API while the user is brought further into the 'wormhole'. The user is stuck in the wormhole during the entire experience as any interaction with the webpage repositions them within the wormhole. The next tasks I need to complete are adding articles from 2009-present to the experience, changing the background color, changing the wormhole color, and adding more interactions to the web-experience. The current version iteration of my final project can be viewed here:  http://aanshshah.com/dla_final_project/
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Assignment 10

For this week's experiment, I decided to do a homophonic translation of a poem by Pablo Neruda. To find this poem, I googled homophonic translation. I wanted to see how close I was at a "good" translation and so I found the same poem translated into English from Spanish. For some additional context, I am familiar with the Spanish language, but it's been a couple of years since I have practiced or communicated in Spanish. Original Poem: Juventud by Pablo Neruda Un perfume como una ficida espada de ciruelas en un camino, los besos del azficar en los dientes, las gotas vitales resbalando en los dedos, la dulce pulpa er6tica, las eras, los pajares, los incitantes sitios secretos de las casas anchas, los colchones dormidos en el pasado,  el agrio valle verde mirado desde arriba,  desde el vidrio escondido: toda la adolescencia mojfindose y ardiendo como una lÿmpara derribada en la lluvia. My homophonic translation: Youth  by Pablo Nemda
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Final Project Proposal

Project Title: Changing Attitude Summary: In this project, I will look at how the sentiment in articles published in The Brown Daily Herald has changed over time. I will scrape all the articles from the Opinions Section (columns, letters to the editors, editorial, and Op-Eds) and analyze the sentiment. I will then find “the average sentiment” from 2015-present and choose representative articles for each of those years. Then, in a 3D experience, the audience will hear a computer voice read an article from each year. Instead of displaying the text to the user, the user will only see the color around them changing as the sentiment of the article changes. The audience will be taken through the change in sentiment over the years via the articles. Details: Concept: I think it’ll be interesting to explore how the experience varies from reading a text-based article. In this experience, because you do not see the words and are influenced by the changing colors, I am curious to see how it
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Assignment 9

This week's reading draws an interesting parallel between machine translation and natural language. At one point, the author argues that there is an important difference between programming languages and natural language, arguing that we can never truly have perfect machine translation. I thought that this was an interesting parallel because language is grounded in rules and programming languages consist of a series of rules. Thus, we ought to be able to reconstruct something that makes up a series of rules using other rules. The author treats machine translation as a black-box, whereas we know exactly how these models are being generated. The program is being fed a corpus that contains a body of text and the "right" translation. Hence, we have complete control over how texts are being translated; the only necessary component to change is the corpus to obtain a better translation. Knowing this, we are able to produce very literal translations. The author uses the concept
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Experiment 7

A collabortation with Abraar, Elizabeth and Rhythm: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ELJqEijlnQF_7jXDJaFv5l53-aqClEG6/view
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