VizWorld.com

The UCLA Asia Institute will be hosting a presentation next Thursday (February 18th, 3:00PM – 4:30PM) from Professor Lewis Lancaster and Mr Howie Lan (both of UC Berkeley) where they will demonstrate a new visualization tool for large text analysis.

A demonstration of a new method of search and retrieval of word occurrence that displays results in abstract visualization. This system developed with support from the National Science Foundation and the Luce Foundation by Professor Lancaster and Mr. Howie Lan is based on the digital version of the Korean Buddhist canon. The interface system will provide a new approach to the study of the 13th century Haein Sa printing blocks content.

In addition to the demonstration, they will discuss how to deal with large datasets and search results that return thousands of hits at a time.  The presentation is free.

via Visualization of Pattern Recognition from the Korean Buddhist Texts: Computational Humanities at the UCLA Asia Institute.

Science presentation, text, visualization

Today is the 150th anniversary of the publishing of the original “Origin of Species” text from Charles Darwin.  In remembrance of this history occasion, be sure to check out an earlier post here on VizWorld covering a visualization of the many versions of the text created by Ben Fry.

Tracking “The Origin of Species” | VizWorld.com.

preservation of favoured traces by Ben Fry

Science darwin, history, text

A few weeks ago, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice published the last statements of 444 executed death-row inmates on their website.  Mark Schaver took the data and used IBM’s ManyEyes website to visualize the data in a variety of ways with some interesting results:

The most frequently used words of those about to die were “love” and “family.”

You can also see the most frequently used two-word phrases. Here “stay strong” was used twice as often as “Jesus Christ.”

via Depth Reporting: The last words of condemned Texans.

Science deathrow, infovis, texas, text

The “Choose Your Own Adventure” series was one of my favorites as a kid, for the control it gave me over the story and the numerous creative ways to find my own doom while searching for the happy ending.  Christian Swinehart has taken the data from the stories and created some beautiful visualizations.

Designer Christian Swinehart has parsed piles upon piles of Choose Your Own Adventure titles, and rendered them as a series of visualizations, from charts documenting how frequent “catastrophic” endings occur as opposed to “favorable” ones to animated representations of every single permutation of a given book to a full-on digital copy of Zork, which tracks your every move on a visual graph.

cyoa · zork. viz Gizmodo

Science infographic, text, visualization

It’s a problem you hear over and over again.  A large collection of material, in this case the National Archives of Australia, is digitized and computerized so that the entire collection is at your fingertips at a moment’s notice.  However, as the digital collection grows it becomes more and more difficult to actually find anything as you drown in the mountain of data.  This case has a happy ending as Michell Whitelaw has developed a pair of downloadable visualizations for visualizing the massive collection.

The first, “Series Browser”, organizes the collection into Agencies (the organization responsible for what’s in the document) and Series, and visualizes it as a hierarchical collection of two-tone boxes where the inner area is proportional to the number of items and the outer area is proportional to the shelf meters used.  It provides a powerful of visualizing the size of certain collections.

The other, “A1 Explorer”, is a classic text visualization operationg on word frequency of item titles.  It contains a classic histogram of word frequency, but also connects words into frequent combinations and co-occurences.

Both visualizations can be downloaded from his site, and run on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

The Visible Archive, via The Visible Archive: Mapping the National Archives of Australia Collection – information aesthetics.

Science infovis, text

Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” is of the most important, and controversial, scientific texts of all time, but many people don’t realize that Darwin spent his entire life refining and updating it.  In fact, the six versions of the text printed during his lifetime grew from 150,000 words to 190,000, with many changes:

The second edition, for instance, adds a notable “by the Creator” to the closing paragraph, giving greater attribution to a higher power. In another example, the phrase “survival of the fittest” — usually considered central to the theory and often attributed to Darwin — instead came from British philosopher Herbert Spencer, and didn’t appear until the fifth edition of the text. Using the six editions as a guide, we can see the unfolding and clarification of Darwin’s ideas as he sought to further develop his theory during his lifetime.

Ben Fry has chronicled the changes in the text over these 6 editions in a web-based Java applet caled “The Preservation of Favored Traces” where you can see edits, insertions, and deletions throughout the six texts.

via the preservation of favoured traces | ben fry.

Science darwin, history, infographic, text