Category: Visualization

Bible-copying Robot

Image of Robotboinboing has a short entry about a German robot that is exhibited writing out the bible. The robot is a RobotLab project (site in German.) The image comes from Marc Wathieu’s Flikr set for the RobotLab where the description of the project reads:

The Kuka robot is silently writing a version of the martin luther bible, which was originally printed in a early font called “Schwabacher”, retranslated here by RobotLab into calligraphy. “Wolfgang von Kempelen, Mensch-[in der]-Maschine” exhibition, ZKM, Karlsruhe (D).

From the lab site it seems they have also programmed it to draw portraits.
Thanks to Lynn for this.

Wayfaring

LogoWayfaring is a site where you can create personalized maps using the Google Map system. You could create a map of your favorite Indian Restaurants.

Like many social networking sites, Wayfaring has commenting and tagging features. Maps can be shared, and they can be dropped into other web pages like YouTube videos.

The interface is slow, and the search is bizarre, but Wayfaring is young.

Locative Art

Following the last post I thought I would blog some locative text and art projects.

Image of FieldHello, world! is a work mowed into a field that encodes in Semacode the universal programmers greeting, “Hello, world!”

Image of SunsetEternal Sunset shows you webcam images of the sunset wherever it is happening at the time you visit. (This one is from Norway.)

Grafedia ImageGrafedia is a site where people can send emails with a word they have seen written in blue and underlined on the street. They then get back images associated with those words.

LogoAbout Google Maps hacks for Sonar is just one post from a group blog with a lot of posts on the category locative.

Screen ImageGutenkarte is built on MetaCarta and lets you see a map with the locations important to a text as Google Books does. They process the text, identify locations in the text and then map them. It would be neater if they let users run a text through.

Swivel: When Sharks Attack!

Monthly Iraqi Civilian Deaths vs. Coalition Military DeathsSwivel is a simple site where people can upload data sets and then graph them against each other. You get graphs from the intriguing like, When Sharks Attack! vs. NASDAQ Adjusted Close, to the serious, as in Monthly Iraqi Civilian Deaths vs. Coalition Military Deaths (seen in picture).

With Swivel you can explore other people’s data, graph different data sets, comment on graphs, and blog your results. It is a clean idea to get people experimenting with data. I wonder how we could provide something like this for texts?

Thanks to Sean for this.

TagCrowd

TagCrowd is a tool that lets you generate a word cloud from text typed in or uploaded. It has a nice clean interface. Unlike our TAPoRware Word Cloud tool the results are HTML so they can be easily integrated into a web page like this,

created at TagCrowd.com


They have a long list of blacklists of words. I wonder where they came from. Thanks to Paola for this.

State of the Union Visualization

SOTU Visualization ImageBrad Borevitz of onetwothree.net has developed another visualization of language in presidential State of the Union Addresses at State of the Union. He calls it a “data toy” and it combines a number of different graphs. One nice feature is that if you click on one Address and then another the word cloud for the first appears behind (and in red) the second for comparison purposes.

I have blogged other such visualization toys that use the State of the Union Addresses like State of the Union Parsing Tool and the SOTU Rich Prospect Browsing of the New York Times.

Thanks to Nick for this.

State of the Union Parsing Tool

Image of VisualizationYet another George W Bush, State of the Union visualization tool can be seen at State of the Union Parsing Tool. I commented earlier on the New York Times, State of the Union in Words. It seems that Bush’s State of the Union addresses are becoming the standard text for visualizations.

This one on Style.org colorizes the lines with the found words. You can set the size of the words (and therefore text representation.)