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Yale grad's 'Prism' program turns text metadata into wavy art |
July 30, 2013
What if the NSA took your text message metadata and made a flowing, colorful diagram with a timeline?The U.S. spy agency -- probably -- doesn't do that. But a 22-year-old Yale graduate, Bay Gross, was actually inspired by the U.S. government's Prism surveillance program revealed by whistle-blower Edward Snowden.Gross, who just started working at Google in New York on Monday, created an application he describes as "part data, part art" that analyzes a person's own SMS messages and lays them out in a rainbow wave. Appropriately, he named it "Prism."Prism, which works on Mac OS, draws the SMS metadata from the user's own unencrypted backups within iTunes. It pulls who was texted and when and plots the data in a "Streamgraph," a type of stacked graph developed by Lee Byron, who is an interactive information designer with Facebook.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2045532/yale-grads-prism-program-turns-text-metadata-into-wavy-art.html#tk.rss_all
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