A chart and some thoughts. That is all.
Each week I feel like I’m playing catch-up. Re-learning once familiar tools can be a bit dispiriting. This week’s newsletter looks paltry in comparison to the effort that went into making it. About 150%* of time went into getting familiar again with a fun tool called ImageMagick. It is an open source image editing tool and has some nice functions that allow you to draw out the colours used in different images. Many years ago I used it as a tool for a post-grad uni assignment. We were supposed to explore a data visualisation tool and share our findings with the class. I got marked down because the lecturer didn’t thing imageMagick was an appropriate tool for the task and to visualise information. Most people used Tableau or Excel. I took the imageMagick outputs and combined them with D3 to make some graphics showing colour breakdowns of different paintings. Fuck knows what he would have thought of my final assignment that used knitting to represent data but anyhow…
I first learnt about command line tools like imageMagick from Jon Keegan,** so when that lecturer couldn’t understand why I was using it, and looking at colour values in a data visualisation subject, while at the same time pushing his own strange views on the topic, I just shrugged my shoulders and realised that the course (which I had hung all my hopes on) was a write off, and I was better off focussing on the subjects I was taking in the design faculty, where the lecturer was all about experimenting and playing around. In his course I was looking at sonification…and knitting. All good fun!
Now, the chart this week is not a good example of what you can do by looking at colour in images. I feel that now that I have the basic tool set up and running, I can do some fun things. Any requests let me know! Do you have an artist you really love, or a set of images you think would be good to have a closer look a hit me up.
Grace Cossington-Smith is one of those artists that I feel very close to. When I pop into the AGNSW, I love to see her work. It’s like an an old friend. Even if I’m in a bit of a hurry, I always try and say a quick hello. I’m not sure this colour analysis does it any justice. It shows the dominant colours used in each of these paintings. ImageMagick reads a jpeg I point it to, and creates a csv file with colour information (I used the HEX code output), that I merged back to a main file that held information about the painting like the name and date (which I used Rvest to quickly pull from the AGNSW website). Maybe I cut the threshold off too early, and I certainly didn’t get enough time to work on the final output. I’m not super-happy with this at all, but it’s something, and that is what this newsletter is all about for me. Making something. You may well see this again but maybe looking a bit different.
Thanks for indulging me this week. I hope to bring you more colour analysis in the future. If you have a topic you’d like to have visualised here (colour…or anything else really), hit reply and tell me what’d you’d like see.
If you also have any chart loving friends, forward them this email.
*me=good with ratios/numbers etc? Hmmm
**Jon Keegan is honestly the best. I love his work, and have done an online course he led with the Knight School of Journalism, which was fantastic. He is passionate about open source tools and a really great teacher. His work is [chefs kiss]
This newsletter was created on Gadigal Land. Just up the river from where I live, pictures and marks were made on rocks to share stories about the world with others, and they were put there tens of thousands of years ago. I want to acknowledge that this tradition of story telling and using images to communicate and pass on information is nothing new - and the Custodians of this unceded land were here, and doing it first.