Tiles: Twitter as visual dictionary

tiles

(Warning: Firmly in the “things I don’t know how to build and can’t be bothered to learn how to” category.)

I grew up flicking through the Dictionnaire Visuel on my mother’s bookshelf right next to that year’s Larousse Universel. It shaped my knowledge of words and the world beyond my bedroom in the 13ème. I grew to love writing and words, even if I still struggle with english sentence structure. When Twitter launched naming convention led to lots of people hogging famous people’s names and company names as a quick way to make money. I was interested in more common words, words that don’t matter. Seeing what people had done with them, seeing who owned them.

I took a classic William Blake poem and looked up all the words and dates as twitter users. Only “bed” was an account that had been suspended (the word “they” linked to a stupidly large image so I took that out too). I pasted the acount’s avatar next to the word. The result is interesting to me, as you could easily create a language around it, and the fact that anyone would bother registering dates as usernames is interesting. Not very many of these accounts were popular. Many came from asia. Most only had ever tweeted once. Ghost accounts for the modern dictionary. Dunno, it entertained me for a few hours as I avoid prepping for Robotlift.

Final thing here.

By designswarm

Blogging since 2005.