in which there are too many circles

[corivax]

Science yearly gives out awards for the best science images and visualizations. Here is one of this year's runners up:

Comments

[corivax]

I wrote it in Processing because I wanted to see what all the fuss is about - one of my work collaborators will not stop talking about Processing ever. I see now! The code is like sixteen lines1, and it would be very fast to turn it into a web toy.

[1] Not counting preprocessing the text, and generating the list of words so common I should ignore them, both of which I'm doing with a separate script.

[corivax]

Legal papers! What a great idea! Someone I know was working on a legalese-to-english translation program, but he never got anywhere. I should see what washington's legal code looks like. Thanks! What an excellent structured text source.

[solarbird]

I've got 1500 words on IMAP4 right here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc161016.aspx

And here's a little Field Notes I wrote about wackiness with DSL:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc162509.aspx

Neither have code, tho' the IMAP4 article has IMAP4 keywords in it.

[corivax]

Thank you!

[jenk]

It occurs to me that the original American edition of Dorothy L Sayers' first novel, Whose Body?, has fallen out of copyright and is available here. Lord Peter Wimsey is has a vast vocabulary, but he's also rather amusing ;) A bit longer than you asked for, though.

[corivax]

I'm sure I can find a reasonably self-contained section. Thanks for the pointer.

[corivax]

I am soooooo shocked you like this. Shocked, I tell you! Shocked!

[corivax]

novalis got it up online and available to everyone way before I did, which is probably for the best. I probably would have wanted to tinker endlessly before actually making it accessible. I'm considering making the baseline almost circular and the connecting lines straighter arcs.

The music visualizations I've seen compare variable-length phrases, which is more complex and interesting. I've been thinking about looking for phrases or other longer increments using something similar to Huffman encoding on a much longer text.

Thanks for your other suggestions. It's a fun problem. :)

[caladri]

I'm planning to repurpose my subsequence-picking stuff from WANProxy for similar use, but I don't know if I will.

[wyld_dandelyon]

A pantoum would be interesting to see, but also very predictable.