Category: Visualization

The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books

Emilie pointed me to an NPR strory on mining mood in 20th century books, Mining Books To Map Emotions Through A Century. This story draws on a very readable article The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books in PLOS One. The article reports on a study of “mood” or sentiment over time in literature. The used the Google Ngram data. I like how they report first and then discuss methodology at the end.

They mention support from an interesting EU funded project TrendMiner. TrendMiner is developing real-time multi-lingual analysis tools.

Continue reading The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books

The Cube at QUT – world’s biggest multitouch installation

Luciano sent me this link to a stunning multipoint touch installation at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, The Cube at QUT – world’s biggest multitouch installation. I like how they have the touch at ground level, but the screen extends up.

I note that the Cube folk also have a Lego Education Learning Centre. I’m doubly envious.

Visual Music

In Dublin I heard DAH student Maura McDonnell present on Visual Music (her blog), which is her PdD research area. Visual Music is one term among many of experiments in light and sound and her blog is a nice collection of resources on this new media form.

From her blog I learned that there is a also a Center for Visual Music that has documentation and an online store.

Maura’s own work can be seen online, see Silk Chroma. The image above is taken from the Vimeo video.

Juxta Commons

Vis-icons

From Humanist I just learned about Juxta Commons. This is a web version of the earlier downloadable Java tool. The new version still has the lovely interface that shows the differences between variants. The commons however, builds on the personal computer tool by being a place where collations can be kept. Others can find and explore your collations. You can search the commons and find collation projects.

Another interesting feature is that they have Google ads if you search the commons. The search is “powered by Google” so perhaps that comes with the service.

D3.js – Data-Driven Documents

Stéfan pointed me to this new visualization library, D3.js – Data-Driven Documents. The image above is from their Co-Occurrence Matrix (of characters in Les Misérables.) Here is what they say in the About:

D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG and CSS. D3’s emphasis on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework, combining powerful visualization components and a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation.

Take a look the examples Gallery. There are lots of ideas here for text visualization.

Hype Cycle from Gartner Inc.

Gartner has an interesting Hype Cycle Research methodology that is based on a visualization.

When new technologies make bold promises, how do you discern the hype from what’s commercially viable? And when will such claims pay off, if at all? Gartner Hype Cycles provide a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities.

The method assumes a cycle that new technologies take from:

  • Technology Trigger
  • Peack of Inflated Expectations
  • Trough of Disillusionment
  • Slope of Enlightenment
  • Plateau of Productivity

Here is an example from the Wikipedia: