Jer Thorpe took the text of two great articles on studies of head injuries in NFL players, one in GQ and another in The New Yorker, and created an interesting interactive visualization tool.
Until this weekend. I spent a few (okay, more like eight) hours putting together a tool with Processing that would examine some of the similarities and differences between the two articles. The most interesting data ended up coming from word usage analysis (I looked at sentences and phrases as well, but with not much luck). The base interface for the tool is a XY chart of the words – they are positioned vertically by their average position in the articles, and horizontally by which article they occur in more. The words in the centre are shared by both articles. Total usage affects the scale of the words, so we can see quite quickly which words are used most, and in which articles.
The results are impressive, and he gets into great detail in his article, but that’s not the end of the story. Jeff Clark took a look at his visualization and used his Document Contrast Diagrams to perform a similar analysis.
I have previously explored the idea of comparing and contrasting document pairs with my Document Contrast Diagrams. The diagram below was created from the same two articles that Jer used in his analysis. There are obviously a lot of differences between the two visualizations both in appearance and in the technical means of constructing the diagrams but the underlying organizational metaphor is the same:
Size of words reflect frequency of use
Horizontal position reflects which document uses the word the most
Vertical position reflects where the words are used in the documents the most
The two visualizations show the same data in different forms, and wind up emphasizing (and de-emphasizing) various points. Check them both out and see what you discover.
Randall Hand is a computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.
Until this weekend. I spent a few (okay, more like eight) hours putting together a tool with Processing that would examine some of the similarities and differences between the two articles. The most interesting data ended up coming from word usage analysis (I looked at sentences and phrases as well, but with not much luck). The base interface for the tool is a XY chart of the words – they are positioned vertically by their average position in the articles, and horizontally by which article they occur in more. The words in the centre are shared by both articles. Total usage affects the scale of the words, so we can see quite quickly which words are used most, and in which articles.
I have previously explored the idea of comparing and contrasting document pairs with my Document Contrast Diagrams. The diagram below was created from the same two articles that Jer used in his analysis. There are obviously a lot of differences between the two visualizations both in appearance and in the technical means of constructing the diagrams but the underlying organizational metaphor is the same:
