Category: Visualization

StÈfan Sinclair has blogged in Visualizing Regular Expressions a project by Oliver Steele that animates regular expressions (those cryptic things you write when searching texts for patterns.) Regular expressions and pattern matching have a long and interesting history that has yet to be written. Two points:

• Steve Ramsay has a nice page on regular expressions where he provides a short history,
  

  Regular expressions trace back to the work of an American mathematician by the name of Stephen Kleene (one of the most influential figures in the development of theoretical computer science) who developed regular expressions as a notation for describing what he called “the algebra of regular sets.” His work eventually found its way into some early efforts with computational search algorithms, and from there to some of the earliest text-manipulation tools on the Unix platform (including ed and grep). In the context of computer searches, the “*” is formally known as a “Kleene star.”

• The Haubens in the online archive of Netizens describe the development of Grep as the one of the first tools to demonstrate the power of piping in Unix,
  

  Grep is listed in the Manual for Version 4 Unix which is dated November, 1973. The date given for the creation of grep is March 3, 1973, following the creation of pipes.(43) The creation of grep, McIlroy explains, was followed by the invention of other special purpose software programs that could be used as tools.

  Regular expression (regex) matching since Grep shows up as a language within most other languages (like Ruby and Java) for handling strings. It is the archetype of the software tool – a utility within a larger environment or application. This is something I commented on in MIMes and MeRMAids.

Looks like Google has been developing demo visualizations, see Even More Google Photos.

Spell with Flickr is a neat site that will spell out words using pictures of letters from Flickr. It is by Erik F. Kastner and comes with code to use in your site. This is thanks to Matt.

Likewise , as we argued in describing the resemblance fallacy , making assumptions that the internal representation is a mental model or image-like may simply give the illusion of solving the processing-internal representation-external representation riddle. (p. 209)

Do we understand how visualizations work, if at all? Work on visualization seems to be premised on the intuition that “a picture is worth a thousand words”. External Cognition: How do Graphical Representations Work? (PDF) by Scaife and Rogers (Int . J . Human – Computer Studies (1996) 45 , 185 – 213) is a metastudy that questions what we really know.
Continue reading External Cognition: How do Graphical Representations Work?

How to visualize news? Phylotaxis by Jonathan Harris (who also did 10X10) is blog/news visualizer designed for Seed: Science is Culture magazine. I think I am going to start a Jonathan Harris fan club – all of his work is perfect in its simplicity and effectiveness.

The Power Of Words is a project by students of my colleagues StÈfan Sinclair. It is both interesting visually and relevant to current events. I am impressed by the work his students are doing. I found it on his blog entry, The Power of Words.

French in the North East of the USA
The Modern Languages Association has a nice Language Map that you can use to see the distribution of different languages by county in the US. It uses census data from 2000. They also have tools for getting data for states and cities to compare language use.

…t.y.p.o.r.g.a.n.i.s.m… is a very cool site that “focuses on interactive kinetic typography” based on the idea that “Type is an Organism”. I particularly like the “ASCII-O-Matic” where you can upload an image (or your face, for example) and see it rendered in type.

Matt Jensen of NewsBlip has pointed me to work he and others are doing on historical visualization. See, for example, the technical report on Semantic Timelines that he wrote. Historical Visualizations, by David Staley in the JAHC: Journal of the Association for History and Computing (vol. III, no. 3, Nov. 2000) surveys the ways visualization is used in history from concepts to timelines.
Another similar project is the Temporal Modelling project led by Johanna Drucker. She and Bethany Nowviskie have been working on visual forms of knowledge production. See their Prototype Designs for a temporal vocabulary which I blogged earlier at 3D Timelines.

flowerGarden by greg judelman is a “web-baed software application, produced in Flash, for real-time soica network and conversation visualization.” It produces a TextArc like visualization of people in conversation and concepts they discussed. Judelman uses a flower of petals for people in a way that makes the visualization look like a garden of words with flowers blossoming. This is thanks to Bethany Nowviskie.