Text Visualization in the Wild

A few days ago Steve Ramsay wrote a post entitled Text Analysis in the Wild. It discussed the phenomenon of the visualization widget attached to a New York Times article on the 2007 State of the Union (the article is apparently already consigned to the newspaper’s pay-per-view archives). The widget, however, enabled you to analyze how frequently various words (like “Iraq”) appeared in the President’s addresses over the course of his term.

The appearance of such a widget in the sidebar of a mainstream news publication suggests that the venerable humanities computing disciplines of text analysis and visualization may be on the verge of becoming mainstream. Here are two more such applications:

TagCrowd is a quick and easy to use online tool that generates tag clouds based on word frequency from a text you either upload or copy and paste into the input window. Here’s a tag cloud of “The Yellow Wall Paper,” which I did for my current undergraduate class:

Many Eyes, meanwhile, is the brainchild of the creative and prolific Martin Wattenberg. Users are encouraged to upload their own data sets and explore them using a palette of available visualizations.

On an academic front, Geoffrey Rockwell has been collecting essays on humanities computing and setting them up for analysis with the impressive array of TAPoR Portal text analysis tools. Here’s an image he sent me of a visual collocation of one of my own pieces:

Finally, MONK has been funded by Mellon. What is MONK? Check here!