This summer, I wrote a TF-IDF clustering library for my internship at Ufora, and I’m currently working on a long-term project for Fusion to track and analyze online data from candidates in the 2016 US Presidential Election.

Needless to say, those two projects have kept me busy, but I also built a few random things for fun in my spare time. And at this point, the total number of things I’ve built has become too cumbersome for an image-oriented portfolio, so I switched to a Google Spreadsheet-powered method, trusted by Darius Kazemi and (as I’ve learned from my Fusion co-conspirator Daniel McLaughlin) countless data hackers at news and media organizations across the country, whose routine CMS systems may require knowledge of COBOL, or worse, Microsoft Sharepoint.

The personal projects I completed over the summer were:

  • MeterMap | Maps clauses from a text corpus onto the metrical structure of a poem.
  • itpbot | IRC bot for the #itp channel on irc.freenode.com
  • PaletteKnife | Tool that extracts color palettes from photographs, created entirely in front-end JavaScript using p5.js
  • Dick Fractal | Personal website of Richard “Dick” Fractal, Ph.D.
  • Four Oh Four | A URLae
  • @BizarroMOMA | Twitter bot tweeting fictional artworks generated from the Museum of Modern Art’s collections data

Certain folks (namely, my parents) have complained to me for a long time that my website does not contain very much information about what I actually make. For their sake, and my own sanity, I added a list of projects below the introductory letter. I did this by writing a Python script that parses a Google Spreadsheets-generated CSV into a JSON file — I plan to implement the script in JavaScript soon, so that my website updates automatically.

We were also supposed to dig into some JSON for Designing for Data Personalization with Sam Slover, so this task fulfilled multiple roles for me.

Here’s the Python script:

And here’s the raw JSON:

And here’s the JavaScript that parses the JSON to my website: