Fukushima Offset is a project about the dynamic relationship amongst the media news, the public discussion,
and the event of Japan Fukushima treated water.
An absurd and playful way of presentation is designed in this project to display how this trending environment topic is changing in the public.
It explores the potential possibility of endangering marine life by political-related public opinion.
Most related scientific research focuses on estimating the mutation rate and biodiversity in an aquatic organism.
Meanwhile, quantitative data in science on radiation-induced genetic changes are lacking.
Fukushima Offset tries to emphasize the individual value through an artistic way to imagine the effect of radiation.
The unpredictable damage to individual sea creatures may be similar to the tsunami in 2011 to the human being.
Data Gathering & Processing & Visualization
The original data is scraped from the comments under different news on Twitter.
Sentimental analysis is applied to process the replies to datalize the potential offset among the news, the public reflection, and the event.
The visualization of data imagines the unpredictable mutation on the individual.
Through the analysis of each set of comments, the gathered comments turn into the parameters of the sketches.
Six special species are selected for the project since the effect of radiation may have a stronger influence on them.
Six news tweets from famous media correspond to the species as the source of input data.
The process of the mutation of the hand-drawn style marine creatures can be seen when the mouse moves to the animations,
which include underlying meanings related to the nuclear treated water event.
The REF Code stands for the reference code for each mutant creature, whose value is the estimated intensity of the sentiment under the news tweet.
Fukushima Offset also has a gallery to collect all the mutant creatures links to the original Twitter news pages.
Techniques
This project uses python crawler to collect the initial comments under the news. Twitter API (standard version) can only catch data within seven days,
but the news was posted several weeks ago.
Therefore, Fukushima Offset utilizes BeautifulSoup library to scrape the specific span tag content, then outputs CSV files.
The sentimental analysis uses Amazon Comprehend API to detect sentiment, which returns the scores of mixed,
negative, positive, and neutral values for each comment.
To achieve the hand-drawn style sketch, laborious drawing was used in P5.JS. The processed data in the JSON file is the input, influencing the mutation.
The artist tries to explore the possibility of combining illustration and computer art, as well as the non-Euclidean graphic in creative coding.