Category: Visualization

Notes on text analysis and toys is a blog by a student here at Mac, Matt Patey, on a project for visualizing the neighborhood of a web site. He is combining text analysis techniques to build picture of how a page sits with others with a similar profile.

Geoffrey Tressider sent me a link to ni9e, a site by two designers with a number of text visualization and design projects including a “Graffiti Analysis” project where they track the gestures of creating grafitti and then use the gestures to create new works. An interesting take on visualizing text – here they visualize the graphic gestures.

Check out how they paint with letters in “typo graphic illus tration” and similar projects.

FreeMind is free Mind Mapping software that works on most platforms. It has cool feature where it can create navigable map of your file structure. The .mm files are XML so one should be able to do other sorts of transformations on them.
Continue reading FreeMind: Free Mind Mapping

Steve Ramsay turned me on to a fascinating diachronic name visualization, The Baby Name Wizard’s NameVoyager. You can type in your name and see its rise and fall over time. Can we create a distribution graph of the top 1000 words in a text like this?

In a previous blog I wrote about Mind Mapping and software that supports it. This came from a one day workshop. I just got the notes from the workshop and here are some of the mindmapping tools that were mentioned:

• VisualMind, Pricing: Basic $69.00usd, Business $149.00usd
• Freemind, Free software
• MindManager, Pricing: MindManager X5Pro $284.05usd, MindManager X5 $199.00usd (Prices increasing Jan 1st, 2005)
• NovaMind Price $103.00cad
• Map It, Price $78.00usd
• Mindgenius, MindGenius business $189 MindGenius education $97 MindGenius home $53 MindGenius brainbloom $53
• Visimap, Price $125.00usd
• Openmind, Price $249.00usd

Continue reading More on Mindmapping

Visual and Statistical Thinking is a “textbooklet” by Edward Tufte that Lorna got me (along for a replacement for my missing The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. It looks closely at two examples of how graphs were used to think through a problem in order to recommend action; first John Snow’s analysis of the Broad Street cholera epidemic, and then the decision to launch the space shuttle Challenger. Tuftewrites that his “general argument is straightforward”:

An essential analytic task in making decisions based on evidence is to understand how things work – mechanism, trade-offs, process and dynamics, cause and effect. That is, intervention-thinking and policy-thinking demand causality-thinking.
Making decisions based on evidence requires the appropriate display of that evidence. Good displays of data help to reveal knowledge relevant to understanding mechanism, process and dynamics, cause and effect. That is, displays of statistical data should directly serve the analytic task at hand. (p. 3, copyright 1997, Graphics Press, Cheshire, Connecticut).

Text visualization in the humanities is not, however meant to guide decisions. Literary analysis guides interpretation which does not lead immediately or causally to decisions. What then is point of interpretative analysis (visual or not)? An extreme view would be that it is an art; the art of creating new aesthetic works of a particular genre called intepretation that stand in a particular relationship with other works. Interpretations are made or crafted from abstract matter, namely other works of art. Their appreciation is predicated on knowledge of the “original”.
Continue reading Tufte: Visual and Statistical Thinking

I’m at the CANARIE Advanced Networks Workshop 2004 today after wrapping up at The Face of Text. I gave a talk about TAPoR – the token humanist at this conference. Most of the talks in my session are about video conferencing over the net and telepresence.
My sense is that “access grids” for shared network meetings are close to being usable. The ViDe Videoconferencing Cookbook was suggested a good starting point if you want to try a virtual meeting.

Zoomify is a cool utility for providing interactive zooming and panning of high-resolution images. It is a specialized visualization tool useful to any with high-rez images that they want to serve.
I heard about this from a paper by Pamela Asquith and Peter Ryan on Kinji Imanishi Archive where they use it. This paper was one of the many excellent papers at The Face of Text – a conference here at McMaster.

10×10 / 100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time / by Jonathan J. Harris is another cool visualization text experiment by the developer of WORDCOUNT. It analyzes the news and puts up 10 by 10 images that represent the keywords. It is done with a Flash interface.

At the Burlington Art Centre I attended a day-long workshop on “The Art of Change” where the “mind mapping” software Mindjet: Mind Manager was demonstrated. Mind mapping apparently was invented by Tony Buzan as a way of unleashing the potential of the mind. See, Buzan Centres – Mind Mapping – Mind Map Definition. The presenter oversold mind mapping and it is not clear that visual thinking software running on a small screen is preferable to a good big peice of software or whiteboard, but at its heart mind mapping seems to be hypertext for thinking – drawing graphs of ideas. What is is strange is how this business technique has spawned software similar to what has come from the hypertext community, software like Storyspace, which bills itself as serious hypertext for writers.
Continue reading Mind Mapping