CIRCA:TextArc

From CIRCA

---

Revision as of 23:15, 19 November 2010

• This page is under construction*

Contents 1 Introduction to TextArc 2 Significance 3 Audience and Purpose 4 Technologies 5 History 6 References

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 

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