The latest version of our Old Bailey Datawarehousing Interface is up. This was the Digging Into Data project that got TAPoR, Zotero and Old Bailey working together. One of the things we built was an advanced visualization environment for the Old Bailey. This was programmed by John Simpson following ideas from Joerg Sanders. Milena Radzikowska did the interface design work and I wrote emails.
One feature we have added is the broaDHcast widget that allows projects like Criminal Intent to share announcements. This was inspired partly by the issues of keeping distributed projects like TAPoR, Zotero and Old Bailey informed.
As I mentioned in my post on the GRAND conference, Ken Perlin showed a number of interesting Java apps that illustrated visual ideas. One was a Interactive Map of Pride and Prejudice. This interactive map is a rich prospect of the whole text which you can move around to see particular parts. You can search for words (or strings) and see where they appear in the text. You can select some text and it searches. The interface is simple and intuitive. You can see how Perlin talks about it in his blog. I also recommend you look at his other experiments.
I’ve been meaning to blog on the video circulating of Kurt Vonnegut talking about the Shape of Stories. He describes the curves followed by popular stories like “boy meets girl” and suggests computers could even understand such simple curves. In Lapham’s Quarterly you can read the text of this lecture with illustrations. See Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard. In this version he asks about the value of such systems, a question which could apply equally to computer generated visualization,
The question is, does this system I’ve devised help us in the evaluation of literature? Perhaps a real masterpiece cannot be crucified on a cross of this design. How about Hamlet?
He concludes that the system doesn’t work because the truth is ambiguous. We simply don’t know in complex works (like Hamlet) if news is good or bad. Good literature is open to interpretation.
But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.
Prism is the coolest idea I have come across in a long time. Coming from the University of Virginia Scholar’s Lab, Prism is a collaborative interpretation environment. Someone comes up with categories like “Rhetoric”, “Orientalism” and “Social Darwinism” for a text like Notes on the State of Virginia. Then people (with accounts, which you can get freely) go through and mark passages. This creates overlapping interpretative markup of the sort you used to get with COCOA in TACT, but unlike TACT, many people can do the interpretation – it can be crowdsourced.
They are planning some visualizations of the results including what look like the types of visualizations that TACT gave where you can see words distributed over tagged areas.
Susan pointed me to Leximancer which is a commercial text analysis tool that creates mind maps of your information. I’m struck by how compelling people find mind maps.
Leximancer enables you to navigate the complexity of text in a uniquely automated fashion. Our software identifies ‘Concepts’ within the text – not merely keywords but focused clusters of related, defining terms as conceptualised by the Author. Not according to a predefined dictionary or thesaurus.
The Concepts are presented in a compelling, interactive display so that you can clearly visualise and interrogate their inter-connectedness and co-occurrence – which is as important as the Concepts themselves – right down to the original text that spawned them.
Thanks to Bethany on twitter I came across this great post by Stephen Wolfram on The Personal Analytics of My Life. Wolfram is not the first person to use computers to track his activities and then understand himself. Microsoft Research has a project MyLifeBits that is “an attempt to fulfill Vannevar Bush‘s vision of an automated store of the documents, pictures (including those taken automatically), and sounds an individual has experienced in his lifetime, to be accessed with speed and ease.” The project is digitizing and following Gordon Bell and they have released a book Your Life, Uploaded. We could even go back to the ancient Greek aphorism “Know theyself” that motivated Socrates and which, in its Latin form (temet nosce), shows up over the door of the Oracle in the Matrix.
Stéfan pointed me to Berkley WordSeer a text analysis tool “that includes visualizations and works on the grammatical structure of text.” You can watch the video with Aditi Muralidharan talking about the project. She sees the problem with traditional search being the way keyword reading models texts as a bag of words. What we can’t do is model text as sentences. In other words she wants to leverage natural language processing to enhance search so you can see how “God” is described or what she/he has done. There are also some visualization tools like a heat map and word tree.
There is a nice YouTube video demoing how to use WordSeer to explore “beautiful” in Shakespeare.
Thanks to Stan I cam across this visualization of movies, Cinemetrics creates a visual fingerprint for movies. You really have to look at the animated video to understand the visualization as an important part is the animation of the segments. The more action in a segment the more it moves giving the viewer a way to see where the action is and to compare movies.
Stan pointed me to “an exquisite jQuery plugin for magical layouts” called Isotope. It allows you to have a layout of items (images of web sites or blocks of information) that can be rearranged with nice animations.
At the inaugural Edmonton Pipelines meeting I’ve learned a lot about different spatial projects. Some include:
City of Edmonton Open Data Catalogue. Edmonton has a great open data initiative. They not only make data sets available, they also have visualization tools that you can use to
Experimental Geography in Practice. This is the blog of Merle Patchett a postdoctoral fellow who is working on a number of projects including one where she is interviewing people about their suburban memories.
Becoming Literate in Space and Time. Margaret Mackey is doing a close and personal reading of her literacy. She is, among other things, mapping her childhood literacy.
The Edmonton Pipelines project is SSHRC funded. They are interested in community engagement which is why they organized the inaugural meeting and invited researchers in the city doing work with geography. They chose the name “pipelines” to play with the idea of how data is changed over space. They have a number of subprojects including one on Queer Edmonton that I am interested in as we are working with Pipelines on a locative game that exposes people to the queer history of Edmonton.
