Overview
Findthegat.com is an online interactive data visualization program that pulls and organizes information from the Web to allow users to compare, analyze and interpret these sets of data. In this specific project developed by Laurier Rochon, the actual content accessed relates to hip-hop music and its multiple social, political and geographical references, but this type of project could easily be extended to include any type of content.
What is a GAT?
Wikipedia defines the term "gat" as : (slang, 1920's gangster) Any type of gun, though usually in reference to a pistol which is the short term for a Gatling Gun, which is a type of machine gun with several barrels on a rotating frame, still used today on some modern aircraft and naval weapons.
I have chosen this slang word used frequently in hip-hop music lyrics because it encompasses well one of the facets of the relationship this art movement has to society. Obviously I could have chosen many other words to name the project, but the term “gat” has a very powerful meaning and is a good example of the hip-hop music’s frequent intention to transcend into reality. Along with rock music, I believe this genre is the one that speaks the loudest to people worldwide and raises important questions about many spheres of our society.
I do acknowledge that not every single part of hip-hop culture is genuine, true, meaningful and wishes to do as described earlier. I realize this could be debated and is somewhat arbitrary, but this related subject is a whole other discussion.
How does it work?
Simply put, the program will ask you to either refresh the data on the server, or you can just use whatever is on there, meaning you will see what the last person to update has generated. The data is essentially hip hop albums, artists and related images that are taken from Freebase. By switching between different browsing modes, the text and images pulled from Freebase will reorganize itself, emphasizing the differences and similarities within the information.