Every day google’s hot trends website releases statistics on the 20 most quickly rising search queries. I wrote a program that downloads this information and collects pictures of each of these items, analyzes the images, crops them based on their content, and finally arranges them into a single visual composition, leaving us with a giant daily collage.
It’s sort of a way to take a snapshot of what society cares about at a particular moment in time. When viewed in sequence, it also allows you to pick out patterns in popular culture. As you can probably guess it’s pretty bleak. Basically every day there’s inevitably a new food or type of desert, a celebrity controversy, some random sexy girl of the day, a few sports players, more celebrities, something cute like “national margarita day”, and then maybe, MAYBE toward the bottom of the list something serious like a massacre in Georgia or the Defense of Marriage Act. Hopefully I’ll be able to set this up on a server so that it automatically makes a new collage every 24 hours. People could use it as a homepage to very quickly find out what’s new in the world without having to scan the news.
Image analysis, manipulation, and montage is done in Matlab. Statistical information is taken from Google Hot Trends.
March 2, 2011:
Feb. 26, 2011:
March 1, 2011:
For more examples, check out the full project page.
Music