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When R. Luke Dubois sat down with a group of students for lunch on Friday, November 20th, he could have begun by introducing himself: Known as R. Luke Dubois or just Luke Dubois, he is an artist based in New York City with many notable works related to data, some of which have been on display at the Zilkha Gallery since the beginning of the semester. But instead he began by asking us what we were working on.

At first, most of us nervously fidgeted in silence. We hadn’t been expecting the spotlight to be on us. After a couple awkward moments, I offered up an explanation of my final project for my data analysis class. Dubois responded with interest and gave some suggestions. After that, other students slowly began to come forward with their ideas, and he continued to react excitedly. He then powered up the projector behind him and showed us some related work by other artists, such as Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg.

After this discussion had gone on for a while, I realized that Dubois wasn’t going to talk about himself or his work unless he was prodded to. I turned the spotlight back on him by asking whether he thinks of himself as an artist or data researcher. Dubois jerked his eyes upwards, and when they re-centered on us he had a funny smile on his face. “I’m a musician,” he responded. “I play the cello badly. I played so badly that I switched to a computer.”

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As the uses and values of data become more well-known, more and more unique ways of exploring and presenting data are emerging to the forefront of the Internet. When Wesleyan invited one of these explorers, Matt Daniels, to give a talk on data journalism and media art, I immediately dug into his portfolio. Daniels hosts his projects on a website called Polygraph, and currently has only focused one exploring data related to music. I was immediately transfixed by the name of his site – polygraph isn’t a word commonly connected to data or information – and, due to blanking on the definition, Googled it. I found the following:

pol·y·graph [ˈpälēˌɡraf]

NOUN

1. A machine designed to detect and record changes in physiological characteristics, such as a person’s pulse and breathing rates, used especially as a lie detector.

With this definition swirling in my head, I came to Daniels’ talk eager to learn what he was all about. Daniels, one of the many young creators who are storming the tech industry, began by clicking to a slide of the visualization that made him “internet famous.” He describes that the goal of this project was to look at the usage of unique words by rappers in their songs. The visualization charts these usages, along with the amount of unique words used by authors ranging from Shakespeare to Melville. The visualization was then followed by some text that further fleshed out what he had discovered. And there you find Daniel’s formula, the foundation of this data journalism he has fallen into: a code narrative + a prose narrative = an interesting and interactive read.

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