Topic

1. ❑ Part I: INTRODUCTION
1. ❑ Introduction to Media Computation
1. ❑ What is computer science?
1. ❑ It's about recipes, and computer scientists study different kinds of recipes (argument from slides)
2. ❑ Programming languages are different ways to express recipes
2. ❑ Why should normal people learn it?
1. ❑ The communication argument goes here
2. ❑ Introduction to Programming
1. ❑ Much of computer science, and all of programming, is all about naming
1. ❑ You name media in files, and can also name them in memory
1. ❑ Why files? Because files are spaces on disks which are huge. You can have acres there.
2. ❑ Programs live in memory, which is more like an apartment building. You can bring things from your country home into your apartment building, but only in bits and pieces -- won't fit otherwise.
3. ❑ You can bring them in and name them
2. ❑ Bring in a picture and name it
1. ❑ getAFileName()
2. ❑ makeSound, makePicture
3. ❑ show, play
3. ❑ We can also name the recipe for bringing a particular media element into memory and playing or showing it
1. ❑ def some function for doing just that.
2. ❑ KEY IDEA: Everything can be named
3. ❑ What does a computer know REALLY
1. ❑ KEY IDEA: Everything is an encoding on top of numbers
1. ❑ Basically, computers only understand numbers
1. ❑ Sequences of numbers from 0 to 255, to be exact
2. ❑ But we can create standard definitions and agreements on how to interpret those numbers
1. ❑ When you save an "A" in a file, your word processor actually stores the number 65. It agrees to INTERPRET that 65 as an A. (DEMO)
2. ❑ Look at an A on the screen. It's actually a series of lit and unlit dots on the screen. We can represent a "graphical" A as a series of binary numbers that correspond to the dots on the screen.
3. ❑ We can encode more complicated things by relying upon increasingly sophisticated encodings
1. ❑ Complicated things like sounds, pictures, and movies (DEMO)
2. ❑ The way we handle media is by making codes from pictures/sound to numbers in various structures/units
1. ❑ Like deciding to work in tablespoons or metric tons, in tables or columns
2. ❑ Part 2: SOUND
1. ❑ The Encoding of Sounds
1. ❑ A sound is a series of samples
1. ❑ How sounds work
2. ❑ Introducing the loop
2. ❑ Manipulating Sounds
1. ❑ Changing the volume of sounds
2. ❑ Rearranging sounds
3. ❑ Changing the frequency of a sound
3. ❑ Creating sounds
1. ❑ Summing sounds
2. ❑ Creating frequencies to sum
3. ❑ Part 3: Debugging
1. ❑ Computers only do what you tell them to do: What did you tell them to do?
1. ❑ Flow of execution
2. ❑ Flow of data
3. ❑ show_vars
4. ❑ Printing out where you are
2. ❑ Programs that make decisions and that repeat
1. ❑ Expanding a program into a linear list
4. ❑ Part 3: PICTURES
1. ❑ The Encoding of Pictures
1. ❑ Pixels in two-dimensions
2. ❑ RGB values
2. ❑ Manipulating Pictures
1. ❑ Changing RGB values alone
1. ❑ Simple filters
2. ❑ Converting to grayscale
2. ❑ Changing RGB values between two or more pictures
1. ❑ Background subtraction
2. ❑ Bluescreening
3. ❑ Changing RGB values between own pixels
1. ❑ "Painting" or averaging
3. ❑ Creating pictures
1. ❑ Drawing on a picture
2. ❑ Putting text on a picture
3. ❑ Compositing images to make new images
4. ❑ Creating pictures for manipulating pictures
1. ❑ Creating a mask
2. ❑ Using a mask to grayscale something that you're inserting via bluescreening
5. ❑ Part 4: FILES
1. ❑ The Encoding of Files
1. ❑ Trees
2. ❑ Manipulating files
1. ❑ Doing something to whole sets of files
1. ❑ Walking directories
2. ❑ Doing things to individual files
1. ❑ Having to face your OWN encodings!
2. ❑ Reading values from files
3. ❑ Moving files
1. ❑ On your disk
2. ❑ Via FTP
3. ❑ Making decisions
4. ❑ Making files from files
1. ❑ Compression
6. ❑ Part 5: TEXT
1. ❑ The Encoding of Text
1. ❑ ASCII
2. ❑ HTML
2. ❑ Manipulating and Creating Text
1. ❑ Chopping up existing text
2. ❑ Generating text
7. ❑ Part 6: MOVIES
1. ❑ The Encoding of Movies
1. ❑ MPEG
2. ❑ Series of frames
2. ❑ Manipulating Movies
1. ❑ It's easy: Make them frames!
2. ❑ Adding something to every frame: Titles, characters
3. ❑ Creating Movies
1. ❑ Animations
2. ❑ Morphing
8. ❑ Part 7: MAPPING MEDIA
1. ❑ Putting text and numbers into databases
2. ❑ Generating text: Creating HTML
3. ❑ Generating graphs: Mapping numbers into graphs
9. ❑ Part 8: Can't we do this any faster?
1. ❑ Introduce ImageMagick
2. ❑ Why is ImageMagick faster?
1. ❑ How computers work
2. ❑ Why machine language is faster: No encoding
1. ❑ How do we get there? Compilers
3. ❑ How fast can we get?
1. ❑ O(n) and complexity
1. ❑ How some recipes can't be written
2. ❑ How some recipes can never finish (in our lifetimes
10. ❑ Part 9: Can't we do this any easier?
1. ❑ Functional decomposition
1. ❑ Making up a drawImage() function to make image composition easier
2. ❑ How we think about functional decomposition?
3. ❑ Using functions for more map/apply
2. ❑ Recursion: Using functions to do everything
1. ❑ Different ways of thinking about recursion
3. ❑ Objects: Lifting the lid on our media
1. ❑ Pixels have pieces and understand different things
2. ❑ Pictures and sounds both understand writeTo()
3. ❑ Dot notation
11. ❑ Part 10: Other ways of writing recipes
1. ❑ JavaScript: Orchestrating lots of things
1. ❑ But really only manipulating text
2. ❑ Java: Get below the encodings