Reflection Overview
This week primarily focused on the third round of peer-teaching, with topics detailed within the helm of one’s final project. Creative text and image generation was compiled through use of artificial intelligence.
Peer Teaching 3: Reflection
Through consideration for my final project, Colors, A Veil for Meaning, I decided to discuss the implications of colors throughout various types of media. Although video-games are the primary focus of my video essay(s), I decided to use movies as the focus for this discussion to not take away from the project itself and describe it’s more broader applications.
Those specific movie examples provided were used from a prior project in DGST 101, Color Visualization in Studio Ghibli Films, where frames from movies gathered through FFmpeg were translated into barcodes through Dr. Whalen’s IMJ software. I explained both programs and thier abilities, but given how complex working with Git and the command-line can be, I decided to avoid teaching that in particular.
A comparison was made between My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and Grave of the Fireflies (1988), which have clear differences in color that spark analysis regarding their prevelant themes, imagery, and setting. These examples sparked conversation regarding the potential of analyzing color and how important it is to symbolic representation in popular media.
Peer Teaching 3: Anxiety and Productivity
Over a span of two days of teaching, I gained insight on a variety of topics. However, I was most interested in Reese’s and Anya’s discussion of more personal topics such as anxiety and productivity, overcoming hurdles with determination. Anya’s final project consists of a Discord bot pretaining to keeping oneself productive, and her teaching produced discussion of how productivity in and of itself can be harmful. Reese’s project is a series of podcast episodes that explains her past mental health troubles and how she overcame them. As an individual who has suffered from both anxiety and bad time-management, these presentations and discussions were very engaging, and I am looking forward to their final projects!
AI and Text Manipulation
Through use of Markov chains, simple text can be manipulated and trained through artificial intelligence to generate infinite texts of a similar or differently specified style. To build the model that yields a Shakespearean Sponge-bob script, I used text files containing:
- All Sponge-bob episode scripts
- The complete works of William Shakespeare — more variety is equivalent to better results
- A hint of the entire Bee Movie (2007) script
The result exists as the following .txt file:
