From CIRCA
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- This page is under construction*
Introduction to TextArc
* Visualizing the structure of text * A text display program: "a visual index" * Visualizing the whole: full text on outer spiral * Visualizing the concordance: words repeated inside with text location determining position ("rubber band") * Visualizing associations: word pairs are linked * Highly interactive * Artistic design
TextArc reading Alice in Wonderland in orange with words
associated to Alice glowing purple while the places the word Alice
appears showing in green on the outer ring
Significance
* "The first accurate cyber-accountant of literature that is capable of analysing the content and structure of a text" * Influential: seen by thousands; inspired other text visualization projects, including a visualization of the history of information visualization, for an information visualization conference (InfoVis) * Boundaries between art - design - text - data - science * Highly interactive * Explores relationship between structure and meaning - but how much meaning is inherent in structure? * Importance is based on frequency, connection is based on co-location: privileges the word as discrete unit * Usefulness vs reading a Review
Audience and Purpose
* Audience: people who need to filter a text quickly * To expose the structure implied by word distribution * To allow deeper interpretation based on structure * To expose timing and interconnection * "Suppose you have 5 minutes to understand a 500 page book with no index or chapters..."
Technologies
* TextArc is a Java applet, typically run in a web browser * Java is an Operating System-independent programming language released by Sun in 1995 * Text is an input parameter * Links to Project Gutenberg (1000s of texts as input) * Other input could be: o E-mails archives o Legal documents o Source code o Financial news updates o Genomics
History
* Conceived, designed and developed by Bradford Paley * Teaches interaction design as ???cognitive engineering??? at Columbia University. Consultant for Wall Street * Originally conceived as a text analysis tool * Released in 2002 * Banff Center for the Arts * Columbia University * SIGGRAPH Art Show ("working artist") * New York Public Library plasma screen * Whitney Museum of Modern Art ARTPORT gallery * Grand Prize (Non-Interactive Digital Art Award) at Japan Media Arts Festival 2002 (for poster of Alice) * Places & Spaces Part 4:2 (text: "History of Science") 2006 * Google Project Room at Chelsea Art Museum 2010
References
