Visualization of Exchange Topics by Eugene Park

This project is an animated visualization of a series of video conferencing sessions held by design professors at the University of Minnesota. Gathering on a bi-weekly basis for one hour during the summer of 2021, these dialogues were called the Exchange and were held over Zoom. These remote discussions were meant to be a time for faculty to exchange ideas and discuss each other’s shared research and teaching interests that they otherwise couldn’t have during regular faculty meetings. For each session, a small group of 2 or 3 professors would co-led the discussion by coming up with a main discussion topic/title beforehand and initiating the discussion with other faculty in attendance.

The data was collected by downloading the raw text transcripts from Zoom and cleaned using Python. Each statement was assigned a keyword that encapsulated the speaker’s main idea. By plotting all the keywords by their timestamps, the resulting visualization is a timeline of how the dialogue evolved over time.

The animation was created using After Effects. Each timeline appears and remains on screen for 8 seconds before transitioning to the next Exchange session. It was exhibited at a university exhibition as a looping video.

The YouTube URL that was submitted was created for this entry.