You choose a live RSS news story and are invited to respond to it with a Yahoo search.
The selected RSS story becomes the subject of the cartoon. The PHP script splits the RSS news story into
words and these are matched with keywords in my Database. Once a match is found, then my illustrations are pulled in
(those which correspond to those keywords). The RSS feeds used are currently from BBC news, but cover very narrow news subjects,
so there is more chance of an illustration matching the words in the story, as I can make enough illustrations focussed on
these narrow subjects to make the matching work.
These illustrations are mixed in with your contribution. You make your contribution by making a Yahoo search- via
the Yahoo developer API. The Yahoo search results are scanned by my script, and compared with an 'emotional words' DB.
In this DB, certain words are given emotional weight - a number and colour for each word, depending on how much
emotion it has. Of course this is subjective, and is a known weakness, which I need to improve on - ideally this
emotional DB should be created by the users, and not myself.
The reason for the use of the emotional DB is to create meaning from the Yahoo results. Otherwise all results have
the same importance, and there's little meaning (this was a problem in the way the
previous version worked).
To be effective a political cartoon has to
have meaning, even if it's not the meaning you intended (which is actually likely considering our random/ generated/
networked approach). And the unintended meanings can be fun and actually quite revealing.
The matched Yahoo search terms are converted into lines and arcs of different colours, shapes and sizes, according
to their emotional values depending on the results of your search. For example,
'hate' is black thick lines; 'love' is a large white circle. Extreme emotional weights are shown big, less extremes small.
I exaggerate the extremes in order to produce an interesting result. There's also quite a bit of randomness built into this,
to add more unpredictability.
The result is a live news cartoon - created in collaboration between yourself, myself, the script and the network.
The results are often surprising, often revealing, sometimes misleading - they seem to play with fact and fiction.