Visualisations of text
The question here is, how to visualise great amounts of text, text as data or non-prose text. One of the current good practices is to build tag clouds like the one in the top image of this page. The principle of tag clouds is to order words according to their frequency in a certain container of text. The higher the frequency of appearence of a word is, the bigger it will be displayed in relation to the other words.
Below I listed some tools for building such tag clouds and other means of visualising text.
- Worlde itself
http://www.wordle.net/create
- Paper on wordle
http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/papers/wordle_final2.pdf
- Wordle plugin for Indesign CS4
http://www.indiscripts.com/post/2010/01/wordalizer-a-tribute-to-wordle
- Wordle and beyond
http://www.tagul.com
- Jeff Clarks Neoformix:
http://neoformix.com/Projects/portfolio/index.html
He goes way beyond wordle, but we do not get any source scripts for his visualisations. he’s working with processing
Stuff with and for Processing:
- Self generating word cloud: http://www.openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=831
- Scattered word cloud: http://www.openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=7042
- Portrait like word cloud: http://www.openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=7050
It’s not enough to tell just one word about Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg. Esp. Fernanda was involved in the development of the major online visualisation tools by IBM Many Eyes: http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/
Other cool sites on visualisation, mostly dealing with data
- http://flowingdata.com
- http://www.visualcomplexity.com
- http://infosthetics.com
- http://datamining.typepad.com/data_mining
- http://convisual.com
- http://designercorner.blinkr.net
- http://gearcrave.com
- http://webdesignerdepot.com