Perception study

From Impure Wiki

Impure is a great tool to easily read and process the Internet as a source of collective intelligence and aggregated perception. This simple exercise is an example of a way to get a snapshot of opinions about some particular subject.

Let's suppose we wanted to know what people is saying about Apple. We will start by placing a String data structure on the space and typing "Apple is " (notice the final space).

Then, we will think of a list of adjectives or attributes that people might be using, trying to make it sufficiently diverse to capture the whole spectrum of possible perceptions. For our example, we could start sith something like

• greed, an inspiration, a cult, great, the best company, the future, the devil, innovative, falling, growing

Let's type this list into the first inlet of a splitString operator. If we used comma + space between each attribute, we will immediately get a StringList populated with them.

Now we will join both things using an Addition operator to produce a list of all the possible assertions about Apple.

We will pass this list to the InternetMultiNSearchResult api module. We will also set the second inlet to "true" to search strictly for our assertions (as quoted strings). After all the searches are completed, it will give us a NumberList that expresses the amount of search results for each item in the list. This number is an easy to obtain measure of the "pulse of the Web", because it lets us know how much people is saying a certain thing in the Internet.

Now, we just need to visualize these results in a meaningful way. There are a few options to choose from, such as Quadrification or CirclesTagCloud, which we can see below:

"Apple" is of course just an example: play with any combination of entity or concept and relevant attributes you are interested in, and take a look at what the Internet is thinking.

Here is the code for this space:

1 String greed, an inspiration, great, the best company, the future, innovative, falling, growing, the devil, a cult, overrated, beautiful, ugly, fast, slow 856 303
3 String Apple is  947 248
5 Boolean true 1038 336
0 splitString 914 304
2 addition 1014 262
4 InternetMultiNSearchResults 1101 284
6 CirclesTagCloud 1109 359 418 416
1 0
3 2
0 2 1
5 4 1
2 4
4 6 1
0 6