Now that we’re used to tag clouds in the realm of web 2.0, it’s time to move to the next level and do more with words. It’s fun to pay less attention to actual sentences but to words only, the more a certain word is used indicates the importance in the text without seeing the whole context of the original text. There are a few website where people can create an alternative tag cloud, or a cluster of words. Wordle takes words from a text or site and transforms these into a cloud that can be transformed into different shapes and colors, check this example from my own blog;
Like Jeff Clark argues on his blog, ‘critical drawback of tag clouds is that the words are scrambled (or sometimes positioned strictly by frequency) and one cannot tell from the cloud which words were actually used together in the original text’.[1] There’s no meaning left anymore, except the interpretation of the viewer.
Jeff Clark also created the wonderful Twitter Spectrum which is an analytical project that uses keywords from Twitter and compares them. The fun part here is that I created one about thee weeks ago and coffee was one of the main keywords and today it’s gone.
Other projects I find fascinating are portraits made out of words or a TextArc of ‘Alice in Wonderland‘. A TextArc is a ‘visual represention of a text—the entire text (twice!) on a single page. A funny combination of an index, concordance, and summary; it uses the viewer’s eye to help uncover meaning’. It’s a ‘tool designed to help people discover patterns and concepts in any text by leveraging a powerful, underused resource: human visual processing. It compliments approaches such as Statistical Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics by providing an overview, letting intuition help extract meaning from an unread text’. [2] The last example uses words from a book while Wordle and Twitter Spectrum make use of data from databases. Most content we watch on the Internet like on Twitter or Flickr and YouTube and all MySQL websites like blogs and newsgroups and discussion boards all make use of pulling data from databases and displaying this data onto the computer screen. So is text always a visualization then if text can be visualized too?
