I decided to create a distant reading visualization using the text of Charlie Chaplin’s “Greatest Speech Ever Made,” delivered, with the protagonist dressed as Hitler, at the end of his classic film, The Great Dictator. I was fascinated to discover that — despite somewhat extensive tweaking — the final product appeared to embody the very things it purportedly railed against. Chaplin’s speech is a takedown of machinery and automated intelligence, advocating for the reinvigoration of compassion into modernized societies  Yet, the largest words were: men, hate, people, world, power — the very things the speech criticized.

In that sense, the visualizations outlined the problems in the world just as effectively as Chaplin’s rhetoric, but does not sufficiently account for the solutions, clearly mentioned less frequently over the course of the speech. It was important to me that the visualization featured literal shades of gray, in order to illustrate the binary Chaplin seeks to distance himself from in the speech. Still, given the style of the film itself, true color seemed to be inappropriate to me. All in all, given the dramatic emphasis of the concepts the speech clearly identifies as undesirable the visualization did not strike me as accurate, despite the manner with which it informs elements of Chaplin’s argument.

I would have loved a visualization tool that let me move words around so as to contextualize the words. For example, Chaplin constantly affirms that x is needed more than why (“more than machinery  we need humanity, more than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness”). I think that redistributing the words within that framework would have served an enormously constructive purpose in terms of telling Chaplin’s story in fewer words. I think the use of objects and shapes, in addition to words, would have added to the images. There is almost a chart-like nature to the way the speech is delivered (“men who despite you, enslave you, who regiment your lives”), so adding lines and boxes would allow for adjectives to be more easily matched with their respective nouns, enhancing the narrative of the image. In terms of animation  it would be extremely cool for the adjectives to shuffle and then be replace with their positive alternatives (“dont fight for slavery,” becomes “fight for liberty,” with the key words dancing in and out, matching up with other phrases to convey the terminological dance of the speech). 

For my visualization, I made of Wordle using Adele lyrics. This Wordle is comprised of the lyrics of her five most recent chart-topping songs: “Someone Like You,” “Rollin’ in the Deep,” “Turning Tables,” “Rumor Has It,” and “Set Fire to the Rain.” It is well known that Adele sings about her struggles in love and the good and bad times in her relationships. I wanted this visualization to show how many of her songs are connected.

This image highlights the major themes linking her songs. The three biggest words in the image are, in order from left to right, “Never,” “gonna,” “love.” It is almost like the Wordle is uncovering the secret message in her lyrics—Adele is doomed to live life loveless and just keep creating songs about it.

If we isolate each one of the words though, we find different meanings. The word “never” is the biggest and most prevalent. That sets tone for the overall image: negative and depressed. It shows that Adele almost always sings about incidents she thinks or knows will never happen or have never happened. When contrasted with the other prominent words, it highlights that this negativity is based on her love life.

The word “gonna” is the next biggest. Because “gonna” ambiguously refers to the future, it is possible that the word could be used in either a negative or a positive context. It does suggest, however, that most of what Adele sings about is events that have not occurred yet.

The third most prominent word, “love,” suggests one thing: this woman like to write love songs. Most are about heartache, heartbreak, and despair, while a few others are about optimism. Regardless, it can be concluded that almost every one of Adele’s songs is about love.

Some other words that stand out are “time,” “wish,” “heart,” “deep,” “turning,” and  “sometimes.” All of these words sound like they are coming from a hopeless romantic. To anyone familiar with Adele, the overall theme of these words would immediately give away the origins of the texts in this Wordle.

To someone unfamiliar with Adele, this visualization is a wonderful way to sum up the basic message of every single one of her songs: Never gonna love.

A lot of people claim to connect with Adele’s lyrics. It would give her words even more meaning if there were a visualization tool to see which words that she used were most stronglt felt or agreed with by her fans. Each person connecting with the word could be represented by a glowing dot. The dots will then surround the words, thereby illuminateing the words that are most popular, or rather, more universally felt. This would not only show how Adele’s word choice allows her to connect with her audience, but also how the audience connects with each other. The genral ideas about love and loss can be presented in a universal depiction.

I chose to create a distant reading visualization of quotes from the Doctor Who episode “The Christmas Invasion” using the IMDB quotes page. Here is my pic:

Obviously, “doctor” is the most important word; it is Doctor Who after all. But the interesting thing about this picture, is that since it is made from quotes and the format for quotes is “(person speaking): (what they say),” you can’t tell if the word “doctor” is the most used because he is the one most often speaking, or because he is the most often referred to by other people. Or it might be a combination of these. Or, it may because some quotes are repeated, incorrect, use stage directions, or are interpreted differently by different people. There is so much variety, that this picture tells us more about the quotes page itself, than the actual Doctor Who episode.

As far as coming up with a new distant reading tool, I’m not particularly creative, so it’s likely someone has come up with this before, but here goes: a 3D model of a page of words, with the words at different heights. The different heights of the words could mean the amount of times the word is repeated, the significance of the word (left up to the artist’s interpretation), the number of letters in the word, the number of syllables, the number of different letters in the word, etc. The list goes on and on. I know this is a very general idea, but I think flexibility is good for this kind of thing. It means many people can use this tool to demonstrate different things about a piece. And 3D stuff is cool.

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/5901658/Fire_Story

I decided to create a Wordle of the story I wrote for our week two homework assignments. This Wordle represents the story well. The largest words that appear on the Wordle are Fire, Suit, and Laura. These words accurately represent the main focus of the story which was about a girl named Laura and a fire suit.

The next largest words are started, observation, chamber, demonstration, and window. At first glance these words are difficult to interpret but after reading the story it is clear why they are frequent. The story is centered on testing a fire suit in a chamber for a demonstration which is observed through a window. Another word that appears large is bar. This word seems more random and harder to connect to the other large words. I even had to think about the connection for a moment before I remembered how a metal bar was crucial at one point in the story. In this case the Wordle actually revealed the significance of an object in the story that even I, the author, was not fully aware of.

Some of the much smaller words such as crash, smashed, panic, and screaming suggest that the story has some form of action or drama. This is an accurate portrayal of the overall tone of the story because it is very much centered on action and drama. Not all of the small words were this easy to interpret. The small words such as red, members, research, music and cold seem different and cannot be used to make a fast generalization about the story.

An improvement to a distant reading tool I would suggest would be the addition of a time element. If a program, like Wordle, could categorize the most frequently used words with respect to the time in the story, this would add great insight. With this visualization we could easily discover the differences between the beginning, middle, and end of a story.

In the spirit of homecoming weekend, I decided to do my wordle piece on the University of Maryland football team. Specifically, I opted to use an article that concerned how Under Armour partnered with the team to produce one of the coolest twists on a theme that I had seen a team do. Ever since its release several year back, Treyarch’s hit game, Call of Duty: Black Ops, has been a popular hit with the young adults around the world; it has also spawned many a spin off and tribute. Prior to a game against highly ranked West Virginia, the Terrapins unveiled their shocking choice of uniforms; the theme was met with an overwhelmingly positive feedback. The theme was dubbed “White Ops, as evidenced by the patterning and coloration of the uniform as a whole. The piece I did the world on is a opinionated, direct review of the White Ops uniform.

The wordle of the review provides several clear clues as to the content of the article; for example, the words “Uniforms”, “Maryland” and “White Ops” stand out prominently. The wordle seems to entice the viewer to “look” at them, calling their attention to the “Style” and its “colors”. The contrast of the black, and Cardinal red on the white background of the uniform itself is almost echoed in the visualization provided by the wordle. In fact, on closer inspection, the outer shape of the conflagration of words appears to resemble the sole of a shoe. Furthermore, I chose the white background with black wording in order to reflect the uniform’s style.

Although the representation the reading visualization provides is relatively accurate regarding both the scope and content of the article, it is still lacking in that some elements seem to be missing. If I could change anything about it, I would expand the interface in order to allow the creator more customization choices. For example, I would allow the reader to choose whether or not to add a color border to the outside of words. One to the driving elements that brought the combination to life was the subtle, red outline that traced the numbers on the jersey. Without an option to add a border to the words, the wordle missed out on a crucial part of the visualization. In addition, I would provide the user more freedom to create a background for the words. Another significant element of the uniform was the light gray used in the state flag’s crest on the uniform; this too was unable to be worked into the wordle and again, served to lessen the the visual impact on the reader.

Source article: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1343282-grading-marylands-white-ops-uniforms-to-be-sported-against-west-virginia

For this assignment, I decided to make a distance reading visualization of the Homestuck text archive. Homestuck, is a long-running multimedia web-comic parody of the adventure game genre. Note that though the comic does have a lot of text (My input text contained 477993 words), many pages are entirely text free, and take the form of animated gifs, flash animations, or interactive games which obviously could not be represented. Interestingly, in analyzing the Wordle creation, easily the most common words are two letter acronyms which don’t necessarily provide any information to an outsider. These acronyms are in fact the chat-client name acronyms of several of the more prominent main characters (TG=turntechGod=Dave Strider, TT=tentacleTherapist=Rose Lalonde, EB=ectoBiologist=John Egbert, GC=gallowsCalibrator=Terezi Pyrope, etc.) In a sense, this really speaks to several of the main features of Homestuck as a whole. Primarily, that it is extremely self referential, and difficult to follow without all relevant background information. It also involves a large amount of dialog over chat-clients, each line of which is preceded by the speaking character’s acronym (but not name). The text also indicates several common themes in Homestuck, NOW and TIME, are both indicative of the extreme prevalence of time travel and time paradoxes in the plot. THINK and KNOW are both also fairly prominent, and vaguely indicate the self aware nature of much of the comic and its characters. Other interesting points include the fact that though common English words were removed from the Wordle, consistent quirk spellings of these words weren’t. Several of the main characters speak in highly characteristic manners, 3MPLOY1NG ON3 OR MOR3 TYP1NG QU1RKS 4ND 4 S1GN4TUR3 COLOR. Though the colors obviously could not be carried through, words like TH3 and 4ND were both fairly common in the wordle.

For a new distance reading tool, I am imagining a system which takes input text and produces a web of links between the words/themes as they are related to each other in the text. For instance, if a character is frequently described as thin, that would be represented as a line between the name of the character and the word thin. The ‘tension’ of the line would be proportional to the relative frequency/importance of the relation, which would bring closely tied ideas closer, and allow only slightly associated terms to drift farther apart. This would allow the user to not only to better perceive the relevant themes within the book, but perhaps find new ones.

In summary:

I chose to make a Wordle of my short story “Farsighted” that I wrote last semester in an honors seminar.  I chose this story because it is the longest thing I have written, so there would be more for the Wordle generator to work with.  Plus, I figured it would help me analyze my writing style and word choices.

It is apparent that the two most used words are “Jacob” and “Harper.”  This makes sense because they are the names of the two main characters.  Also, this story is written in third person, so I addressed them with their names and respective pronouns.

What was a little disappointing to me as writer was the fact that it appears that the next most used words are “just” and “back.”  When I first saw them on the Wordle, I was surprised, thinking that those were two odd words to be used so frequently.  But then when I looked back (haha…there’s that word again) at my story, I realized that I did used them quite a bit.  My story is full of phrases such as “just because,” “just as,” “just then,” “standing back up,” “looking back up,” and “walking back over.”  These phrases are fine every once in a while, but after a while it seems a bit repetitive and takes away from the quality of writing.

Another common word I used was “eyes.”  This was a word that I thought made sense to be used so many times.  First of all, the name of the story is “Farsighted,” which has to do with eyesight.  Jacob is constantly telling Harper to get her eyes checked out (both literally and metaphorically), because she can’t see what’s right in front of her.  Also, when I write, I tend to show emotion through the description of my characters’ eyes, through phrases like “bright eyes,” “watering eyes,” “averted eyes,” and “eyes burning with intensity.”

What this Wordle doesn’t tell you is the premise of my story.  Basically, it’s your typical best-friends-into-lovers type of story.  Jacob and Harper are best friends, but Jacob is in love with Harper and is waiting for her to figure out that she actually loves him too.  But interestingly enough, “love” is not that common of a word in the story, and neither is “friend.”  You would think that they would be the most common, considering that they are two major themes in the story.  But this is due to the fact that themes don’t simply arise from the words in the story–they come from the meaning of the words as a whole.

What would be really cool is if there was a distant reading tool that was able to visualize the meaning of the text, as well as the themes.  I’m not really sure how it would work, but it would be really neat of somehow it was organized so that the theme was the largest word, and then all associated words with that theme were smaller and underneath or around it.  I think that would be another interesting way to use distant reading tools.

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/5895626/Sam_and_Zombies

I chose to visualize my “Baptism of Death” narrative from week four for this assignment. Making a connection between the text generator and details underlying the narrative may seem easier because I knew the inspiration behind the story. I assumed that the largest words would be those alluding to zombies and some sort of chaos: I was partially correct. The most prominent word was zombies while a few of the smaller words do reflect chaos.

To someone looking at the Wordle, the largest words may seem disconnected. Those words are teleporter, zombies, room, elevator, leg, and Sam.  The accuracy of these words is very good in mentioning the main subjects of the narrative. By connecting the larger words, the viewer of the Wordle may believe Sam comes in contact with zombies, a teleporter, and an elevator at some point. Unfortunately, the words do not reveal any clues about any details describing actions within the story or the significance of the larger words.

The smallest words provide the details surrounding those important parts in the story. Words such as running, pistols, American, and blood suggest an environment with war or some kind of chaos. Surprisingly, these words help explain some of the questions left behind by the larger words. By connecting the smaller words, one may believe that an American is running with pistols and interacts with blood in some way. Combining this inference with the inference created by the large words, a possible connection between the words may be that an American named Sam is running from zombies. This explanation would also clarify what blood has to do with the story and why chaos is apparent.

A distant reading tool I think would be very helpful is a tool similar to a search bar that can search for possible sources of inspiration behind a story. The first thing that comes to mind when I want to search for the connection between words and phrases is the Google search bar. In some cases, the search returns results directly related to what I searched for and people or ideas that may be associated with it as well. What if a distant reading tool incorporated this into what words appear on your screen? An entirely new story could be created by linking the most popular words in returned articles by Google. If those words were glowing or somehow looked different from words in the original Wordle, it may help viewers decipher some hidden messages that could be associated with other sources of inspiration. I did this for my own Wordle. I typed the largest words in Google and the list of articles that appeared were all connected to the game “Call of Duty” which was my inspiration for my story. By connecting that game to the words seen in the Wordle, the visualization may be even more effective.

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/5892811/Welcome_to_Sim_City%2C_TN%3A_Where_the_View_is_Deadly

After playing around with the site a bit and fiddling with the font styles and color choices I finally created a visual that I really liked, but there was a problem.  When I looked back at the overall layout of the picture I soon realized that sure, it was eye catching, but it did not capture the main idea of the original written story.  There are words that were larger than others that should have been in a smaller font and vice versa.  The premise of the story was about how my character Laila decided to pick up and move because she needed change.  She made the choice to move to a town in TN where she quickly becomes friends with a woman named Narelle and over time she meets this guy named Isiaic and well, the rest is to be determined.

With that said, it is evident that one main aspect missing from the distant visualization is the mention of the name Laila.  On the other hand there are things that the visualization got right and that were pertinent to the story.  For instance, the mentioning of Tennessee, and the citing of the words moving, time, Sims, home and even deadly. All of these words are key to the outcome of the story as mentioned above.  Without them the story would not have been what it was originally written as.  Although the visual is quite cool and extracts what it believes are the main words of the written piece there is still something about the written word itself.  When you pick up a story and start reading line by line, you as the reader begin to fluctuate your voice where you feel it’s needed in order to fully grasp the meaning and feeling the story is attempting to portray, but you cannot do that with the visualization.  With this you basically have to read between the lines in a sense and hope you get the full meaning, but the truth of the matter is that no matter how long and hard we try, it won’t be the same.

As for a new distant reading tool, I believe that my concept would be simple:  a tool that REALLY grasps the main concept of a piece of work to the point where if somewhere were to view the visualization they would fully understand the entirety of the story as if they were reading a written story.  But, until then, we guess we must take our fares as we find them and stick to what we know!

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/5883767/Pride_and_Prejudice

For my distance reading, I chose to take a look at the text from the novel “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen.

I was initially struck by the prominence of names in this wordle. Every single “large” word is a name or a title – Elizabeth, Darcy, Mr., Mrs., Jane, etc. But then I remembered that Pride and Prejudice is a 3rd person novel and therefore proper names are a lot more frequently used than “I” or “you” which would have been excluded from this wordle anyway and therefore made way for some of the other words to show up, aside from names.

Something I do find interesting and possibly telling about the prominence of names, however, is that it shows the age and gender differences between the different characters and the way that those differences were represented in conversation and relationships between those characters in the novel and in that era of life. Mr. is more commonly used than Mrs., even though I’d say there was a pretty even split of female and male characters of prominence. Furthermore, the most popular female name is Elizabeth, a first name, while the most common male name is Darcy, a last name. It was Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, not Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam, or Ms. Bennett and Mr. Darcy. It seems to indicate that the males and the elders in the novel got a heightened level of respect. This trend of male surnames and female forenames is further represented in the wordle by the appearances of “Jane,” “Bingley,” and “Lydia,” among others.

There’s also an interesting trend that pretty much every word that isn’t a name or a title is some word of relationship – “father,” “family,” “daughter,” “dear,” etc. all indicate an emphasis on relationships between people – a focus of the novel. It is also intersting that the biggest non-name word is “must,” a theme in this book. The novel focuses on what Elizabeth and Jane and proper ladies in society must do in order to lead happy and fulfilled lives – ascribe to gender norms and marry well, living as a happy housewife for the rest of her life.

I was really intrigued to see that the word “love” is one of the smallest words on the graph. For a novel about women getting married, it’s interesting that the word barely gets used, and I think someone who was just looking at this graph would have no idea what the novel is about. With some context though, I think the lack of the use of the word “love” indicates the nature of the plot – the girls were not supposed to get married for love. it could be a fortunate side effect, but the aim of marriage was wealth and social status.

A distant reading tool I wish existed would be one that detects time period of a text based on types of words being used. It would analyze the words and spellings of those words, as well as their context, to determine their time period. Beyond using this as a tool to analyze literature once it’s developed, I think it would be cool just to be able to develop this tool and determine the potential of a collection of words to deliver historical meaning and determine the possibilities of distance reading.