The exhibit From Aaaaa! to ZZZap! opened last week with a hit of the start button. Michael Mandiberg wrote a script to upload the Wikipedia corpus to print-on-demand service Lulu over the course of a couple of weeks. The work comes from his larger project Print Wikipedia.
Print Wikipedia is a both a utilitarian visualization of the largest accumulation of human knowledge and a poetic gesture towards the futility of the scale of big data. Mandiberg has written software that parses the entirety of the English-language Wikipedia database and programmatically lays out thousands of volumes, complete with covers, and then uploads them for print-on-demand. Built on what is likely the largest appropriation ever made, it is also a work of found poetry that draws attention to the sheer size of the encyclopedia’s content and the impossibility of rendering Wikipedia as a material object in fixed form: Once a volume is printed it is already out of date.
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We know that more education usually equals more income, but as the cost of education continues to rise, the challenge to earn a college degree also increases.
We know spending changes when you have more money. Here’s by how much.
Stare at boundary lines long enough, and you’ll start to see weird things too.
Some places attract young singles, whereas others attract married couples and families. I was curious how this varied across the country, so I mapped it.
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