I’ve recently been inspired by some text visualization methods. Of specific interest to me are Edward Tufte’s Sparklines, simple word sized graphics, which allow their users to get the gist of what’s happening with the data without needing to fully read it all. The graphic below is a 13th century manuscript bible with these amazing decorative tendrils. Reminds me of most standard Hebrew bibles which has scribbles signifying musical phrases and tones drawn above and below the words.
I wonder why we’ve lost these decorations and symbols from our text styling. This is slowly coming back with (::cough::) emoticons. I’ve always wanted to have cynical text. That would extremely useful!
Another project, Similar Diversity, is a well-done textual analysis which visualizes words from English translations of Holy scriptures. My favorite of their images is the first one below:
Different colors signify the holy book the word appeared in, while size, obviously, relates to the number of times the word came up. I wish they had chosen more interesting words, though. Its obvious that GOD or LORD would show up most in the scriptures, but how about the word RAPE or WAR? Or even LOVE and HATE? That would be fascinating!
This is an illustration of the relationships between the words. Very stylized, clean design. I like it.
[tags] text, visualization, sparklines, tufte, similar diversity [/tags]