Reading 5 - Kristin Martin

In Cory Arcangel’s article “On Compression” he explores the concepts of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) technique in relation to JPEGS. I have never really explores the technical side of JPEGS and data compression so it was interesting to learn about the different types of compression and how data is sent in compressed amounts for more efficient sharing.

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Arcangel stated, “Data, especially large amounts, is expensive and slow to transport” and the most efficient was to send and receive large amounts of data would be mailing it (221). Imagining a world where large amounts of data couldn’t be compressed and everyone was force to send it on a hard drive via the post office, I am thankful that isn’t the case.  We are able to send large amounts of data because of compression. Arcangel explains that there are two kinds of compression, Lossless and Lossy.

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            Lossless compression doesn’t lose any data compares to Lossy. Lossless condenses the data from the original source making it smaller and easier to send. Arcangel explains this in computer language by saying “we have stores all the information using less space.” (221). An example of Lossless compression is “zip files” which we use in class to share our Proccessing projects on Google Drive.

            

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The second compression type is Lossy which is similar to Lossless by simplify the information just it doesn’t summarize it or make it smaller it loses some information. Lossy compression cannot be used for text because the data wouldn’t make sense, its like trying to write this blog post and the taking out all the vowels. Lossy compression is used for images, music and video about our ears and eyes will fill in the blanks of what is missing and not even notice it is gone in the first place.

It was really cool to learn how data is really stored and compressed for easy sharing. I have never really looked behind the scene of what was going on when I compressed a folder or emailed a photo and I can see why that would be hard to send.