Eat Your Tweet was created for the ocassion of the BigClean conference Prague focused on the recycling of public sector data into an open data. We were invited to perform our edible storytelling and data cuisine experiments and accepted the invite. Seriously.
After some heavy contemplation, it occurred to us that these kinds of conferences are usually eagerly promoted on Twitter //or whatever it is called now idk// and attendees are diligently filling their twitter streams with fresh updates from the lecture hall and gossips overheard at the coffee machine. And that’s a nice source of data, right.
We decided that, this time, we will cook the OpenSauce from all tweets produced under the conference hashtag #bigcleancz and let the attendees to literally eat their words back. We called that Eat Your Tweet or, Sežer si svý kecy.
It worked like this: we were sampling the #bigcleancz tweets for some time before the conference started, then we compiled them into one text and performed a network text analysis that resulted into an extraction of six keywords, aka sauce ingredients. To make this happen, we used a text visualisation technique that allowed us to browse through a content of a given text corpus, and extracted single text units (words) based on their mutual relations (words‘ proximity). By folding the linear text into a network of interconnected words, this technique offered an alternative view on the source text and enabled us to translate it into a sauce. We basically visualised normalized textual data as a network graph shaped as a sauce recipe, where each node represented a single sauce ingredient. The translation of the node into the unique ingredient was performed through mapping of the graph onto the classic RGB colour spectrum wheel, where each node assumed a certain position defined by particular colour frequency. Going back to our OpenSauce recipe feature, where each colour frequency matches a particular ingredient, we were finally able to translate the whole graph into a sauce. The ultimate #bigcleancz tweet recipe was born.
Good, yes?
Although we created the recipe out of usual textual input at that time, the idea of arbitrary data cuisine was basically included again, as the source text of the recipe didn’t include any information about food at all (ok, it actually did, as some of the participants who were aware of our experiment posted tweets like: „cheese, I want a cheese in the sauce!“ or „pepper pepper add pepper“..which was obviously biased, as the proximity-based text analysis doesn’t take the contextual semantic meaning into an account).
Another fun part of the Eat Your Tweet concept was that everyone who was tweeting, automatically became a part of the collaborative recipe creation – no matter if they wanted or not. Cooking basically became a byproduct of other daily activity here.
Ok, this is quite a long description, let’s just put it simple: Eat Your Tweet is based on the idea that you are what you eat, you are what you tweet, and… you eat what you tweet.