Yet 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.)
NT2 | Nouvelles technologies, nouvelles textualit?©s is a lab directed by Bertrand Gervais at UQAM that “promotes the study, reading, creation, and archiving of new forms of texts and hypermedia works.” (My translation from the French.) They have an excellent news blog, Activit?©s, that comments on cyberculture and research. Here are the questions they are asking:
Quel est le statut du texte litt?©raire, de l‚Äôart, du cin?©ma sur Internet? Quel est le statut de toute ?ìuvre, ?† l‚Äôheure de l‚Äô?©cran reli?© et de ses technologies? ?Ä quel type de mat?©rialit?© sommes-nous convi?©s? ?Ä quelles formes de lecture, de spectature, d‚Äôinterpr?©tation? (Pr?©sentation)
Edward Tufte’ Beautiful Evidence is the latest in a series of impressive books about visualization and design. I can’t help thinking that this time he has overstretched himself.
First, he doesn’t really tackle the “beautiful” in the title. What is the difference between beautiful evidence and informative evidence? What makes evidence beautiful and is that different from informative? Underlying this is a question about the difference between design and art, which I think he has chosen to ignore as I can’t find it discussed in the book. He is, however, aware of it – here is a quote from a long (PDF) interview in Technical Communication Quarterly:
Beautiful Evidence follows a growing concern in my work: assessing the quality of evidence and of finding out the truth. The other side is that sometimes displays of evidence have, as a byproduct, extraordinary beauty. I mean beautiful here in two senses: aesthetic or pretty but also amazing, wonderful, powerful, never before seen. In emphasizing evidential quality and beauty, I also want to move the practices of analytical design far away from the practices of propaganda, marketing, graphic design, and commercial art. (Page 450)
Second, the book reads like a collection of essays. He has put the The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint and an essay on sparklines in the book, even though they don’t quite fit. Finally, the book ends with plates of his sculpture which seem to be an ad for his sculpture and only loosely connected to evidence.
Many Eyes is an IBM site for shared visualization and discovery. If you get an account you can upload data sets and then try different visualization tools on them. Others can create visualizations from your dataset and/or can leave comments on a visualization. See for example this visualization of bible names.
Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to “democratize” visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Jump right to our visualizations now, take a tour, or read on for a leisurely explanation of the project. (From About Many Eyes)
What is interesting is the “democratic” nature of the site – a sort of Flickr for visualization.
Thanks to Judith for pointing me to this.
I have set up an account on the TAPoR portal where I have created a list of Humanities Computing Links. Because it is on the portal you can analyze the texts. I have also tagged them so you can look at a subset like, Text Analysis.
A Companion to Digital Humanities is now online. This is a collection of essays on humanities computing by leading digital humanists. I contributed a short chapter on Multimedia written with Andrew Mactavish.
Update: Thanks to Matt for finding a typo.
Computer History Museum – Selling the Computer Revolution – Marketing Brochures in the Collection is a magnificent site that makes available brochures and manuals from their collection. These include the Apple – 1 Operation Manual. The cover images alone make an interesting study.
There are many ways to study the history of a technological topic. One of the most neglected, though also the most revealing, is to look at the advertising materials companies have produced to promote their products. In a technical field such as computing, buying decisions, as expressed in such materials, are often based on a complex blend of ‘atmospheric’ messages focusing on status, and highly-detailed technical information about the product itself. (From the Overview)
The New York Times has a wonderful example of rich prospect browsing in The State of the Union in Words: A Look at the 34,000 State of the Union Words Delivered of George W. Bush. They show the different State of the Union addresses with the pattern searched for in red on the left. On the right they show frequency bubbles for key words including the one you search for. Rich prospect browsing is an idea I learned about from Stan Ruecker – see the Humanities Visualization projects he is involved in.
Thanks to Daniel for showing this to me.
The catalogue of UK Entrances to Hell is a collection of images of strange dark entrances (usually boarded up.) There is now a Flickr group too. Remember the safety rules:
Rule 1: It may be an obvious thing to say but NEVER try to go inside an entrance to Hell.
Rule 2: Always approach an entrance on your stomach.
Rule 3: Don’t shout at the devil (not even with good news).
Rule 4: Wear rubber gloves for 3 or 4 days after your visit.
This site came up when I googled “go to hell”.
The DigiBarn Computer Museum has a collection of amusing Screenshots Funstuff including this shot of Word with so many toolbars turned on that they frame the content. Toolbars gone wild.