Overview

This project attempts to satirically engage the world of informatics attached to American Presidential political discourse. The generativity enabled by the Processing programming language and the Rita library work hand in hand to create endless political situations to satiate the ravenous American public, who has incresingly become obsessed with following such information through major media outlets, and specialty blogs like fivethirtyeight.com . The high level of computation necessary to create electoral college maps such as the one depicted in this project lead consumers and pundits to check in incessantly for changes and variables of consequence. To that end, this project compliments total electoral figures with generated political commentary. This commentary attempts to explicate the results in the map, generating poltical rationale for successes and failures. In the end, the endless generativity of political situations and commentaries to support them point to two conclusions: that political discourse and its complimentary media coverage are empty, but simultaneously, the uniquity of every year's political landscape based on the large number of situations this interface can produce.

Process

This project grew out of the discovery of an electoral map program (very basic) on the wikipedia entry for the Processing language. From that code, I worked with Matt Jacobs to develop a generative map that would endless recompile (and recolor) the map for new political situations. With that map working, I started trying to figure out how to make a "official looking" CNN-esque election informatic display. I eventually created a mock-up (below) for roughly what I wanted my interface to look like.

After developing the mock-up, I went about beginning to build generative political commentaries. They began very basic, and then developed a little more complexity. I realized at this point that the more I controlled the variables, the less dynamic the project felt, but it also had a more distinctive narrative arc. If I kept Republicans bumbling, and Democrats succeeding for instance, then the project had a certain humor and satrical slant, which I liked.

After integrating this otherwise seperate act of grammar generation, the project began to really take shape. The next (most difficult) task that I faced, was getting the map to generate Electoral vote totals. I felt very clever when I suddenly struck on how to do this; I created an array of int variables, all of which reflected the electoral vote value for the state located in the same position in the state string array. This meant that when I gave a state to the democratic candidate, the value in the same position [i] was pulled from the electoral value array and added to a Democratic total. I then merely subtracted the Democratic total from the total available electoral votes (538, hence the blog name) and had a working republican total.

Conclusions

At the present (3/2) I feel that this work has a lot of potential but still needs a lot of work. Which is unfortunate because it is due today, and I don't know when I will have more time to work on it. The two tasks that really need to be completed are integration between electoral values (which states are won by whom) and grammar feedbacks so that the candidates selected by the generative grammar can be "known" by my interface and addressed appropriately by the text. I would also like to add more to the project, developing perhaps a "generative political ad" to run as a sort of banner ad in the corner, and photos of the candidates to display with short profiles.

Clearly there is a lot of work to do. That said, I very proud of the work I got done on this in the last two weeks. I've learned a lot about working in the processing environment (including the great advantage of working with SVG files for hierarchy and the ability to rewrite settings) as well as teh Rita library and its immense value for textual generation. I was initally put off by what I consider a really tired genre of electronic writing (generatie text) but have found that by thinking in terms of total packages, a lot of power can be built on this modules