FlowingData

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2008

Nathan Yau over at FlowingData has a nice post up today pointing his many readers to some of my recent work - Word Portraits of Famous People - Einstein and Ginger the Cockapoo. I must admit I never expected to see my dog's name mentioned together in a headline with Einstein.

So what is FlowingData all about ? In Nathan's words:

The site is an excellent pointer into the world of statistical data visualization. Nathan has also done some high quality visualization work of his own. Below is an image from his visualization Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America. Check out FlowingData if you haven't already !

My World Has Room For Wildlife

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2008

My work over the last couple of weeks has involved analyzing images and reconstructing them using words and letters. There exist many fonts that actually contain non-letterform designs and my techniques work with them as well. For the image below I made use of the Animals font by Alan Carr to draw the component shapes. The starting seed image of the globe is a screen capture from NASA World Wind.

I have a vector version of this image in PDF format that can be printed at any resolution and I think the design would look great in poster or T-shirt form. I'm going to try a little experiment to gauge the commercial potential of this kind of thing. I will send you the PDF for a minimum donation of $20 US to Neoformix and you may then use it to print up to 10 physical items - posters, mousepads, T-shirts, whatever. The image has a width:height ratio of 4:5 and so would match perfectly a 16 x 20 inch print.

Note that this is a manual process - I don't expect thousands of requests ! After your donation you will likely have to wait a few hours until I process it.

Here is a zoomed image of the area around the Gulf of Mexico:

Eyes From 'i's

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2008

The 2 eyes in the image are constructed from 19633 repetitions of the letter 'i' in different sizes and colors. The eyes appear courtesy of my 1 year old nephew Ryan. The 'i's appear courtesy of the font Georgia Italic.

Click image to see a larger version

Obama Victory Speech

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2008

The word portraits I've been creating lately are visually interesting but lack the ability to express longer text passages in a legible manner. I've started exploring another technique for combining images and text that might be better suited for this purpose.

The picture below is constructed from the text of Obama's victory speech on election night together with the iconic Hope/Progress image designed by Shepard Fairey. I had to fiddle a bit with font sizes and spacing to get the text to smoothly fill a complete rectangle but it was a fairly simple process.

Click image to see a larger version

George Boole

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Fri, 07 Nov 2008

George Boole was the inventor of a logical calculus of truth values which provided a basis for modern computing. The binary digits '1' and '0' are often used to represent true and false in boolean algebra and seemed fitting symbols to use for his portrait.

President Obama

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2008

I stayed up all night putting the words in just the right places...

Click image to see a larger version

Reconstructing Ginger

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Sat, 01 Nov 2008

The Word Portraits that I have been creating lately use an algorithm that analyzes a starting image and finds rectangular patches of a reasonably consistent color. These are then filled in the generated image with words or letters painted with the average color in the rectangle. I thought it might be interesting to explore piecing the generated image together from fragments that aren't based on words and letters.

The subject for this study is my little four-legged friend Ginger. She's a six year old Cockapoo (Cocker Spaniel / Miniature Poodle cross) , very friendly with kids but a little shy around adults she doesn't know. I don't think she'll mind if you look at a few pictures of her.

The first image just uses the letter 'O' to fill the color-consistent regions. The second uses a leaf-like patch made from bezier curves. They both leave quite a bit of the black background peeking through so the overall image is darker and loses some realism.

These next two images use simple rectangles and circles as the fill shapes. I have also 'overdrawn' them a bit bigger than the original patch which tends to fill up the black gaps. Our eyes pick out the straight edges in the rectangle filled version so it looks less realistic than the one filled with circles. If you squint or look from far away the circle-filled image looks pretty much identical to the original image. This technique could be (and probably has been) used to save images in a compressed form.

This last image uses variations on a spiral shape to fill the color-consistent patches. The area around one of Ginger's eyes is expanded on the right hand side to illustrate the spiral details.

Colored Word Portraits

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2008

Just for the fun of it I've modified my word portrait code to create colored images. Here is one for Obama again generated from 'HOPE', 'CHANGE', and 'YES WE CAN'. These images also use vertical text which allows filling more of the available space.

Click image to see a larger version

The font used in the image above is called Impact. Here is a second image created with a different font that is very thin - Bernhard Fashion BT.

Click image to see a larger version

StreamGraph for 'One Week'

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2008

Here is a StreamGraph constructed from the 'One Week' speech delivered by Obama on Oct 27th, 2008. It does a good job of highlighting the major themes of the speech.

Click image to see a larger version

Einstein Word Portrait

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008

Click image to see a larger version

I believe the 'seed' image I started from is by Philippe Halsman. Thanks again to Gui Borchet for the inspiration and to Processing.org for the tools.

Obama Word Portrait II

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008

I have created another word portrait of Obama. This one has more instances of larger words in the darker areas as well as more detail.

Click image to see a larger version

Thanks again to Gui Borchet for the inspiration and to Processing.org for the tools.

Obama Word Portrait

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2008

I stumbled across this image today by Gui Borchet and was inspired to try something similar.

I adapted my space-finding/word-filling code that I have used for Word Hearts, Clustered Word Clouds, and a few other projects and produced this image of Barack Obama. The image is built out of many repetitions of the text fragments 'HOPE', 'CHANGE', and 'YES WE CAN' in various shades and sizes.

Click image to see a larger version

StreamGraphs Featured in Montreal Gazette Ad

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2008

There is a full-color, full-page advertisment in today's Montreal Gazette that features some StreamGraphs I created. There is no easy link to see it online although you can get to a thumbnail version of the page through their digital edition. An image of the Ad is shown below. It is advertising the newspaper itself and is part of the 'Words Matter' campaign created by bleublancrouge.

These StreamGraphs illustrate the frequency and distribution of the key words in a text. Those in this advertisement are based on the speeches given by the respective party leaders after the Canadian federal election was over last week. They aren't the best examples of StreamGraphs because the speeches were fairly short which causes them to be very wiggly. The technique works better for series that don't vary quite so dramatically over time. They are, however, colorful and unique and seem to grab people's attention. I colored each graph to match the standard colors for the corresponding political party.

Thanks to my new friends at bleublancrouge.ca for offering me the opportunity to get some exposure.

Oct 15th Presidential Debate

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2008

I made Clustered Word Clouds from the words spoken by the candidates during the debate last night. For some reason I don't understand, McCain's speech led to smaller word groupings than Obama's so I included extra groups to make the total number of words shown more equal. Click on either image to see a larger version.

Obama's Speech on Economy

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2008

Obama delivered a speech in Toledo, Ohio yesterday on the economy called A Rescue Plan for the Middle-Class. I've created a Clustered Word Cloud based on the text and it is shown below. Notable word groups that stand out are 'create new jobs' , 'tax cut 95% families', and 'Senator McCain worried losing'.

Two Canadian Leaders

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Sun, 12 Oct 2008

There is a federal election this Tuesday, Oct 14th, in Canada where I live. I came across some reasonably objective profiles of the leaders of the 2 largest political parties in the Toronto Star. Stephen Harper is currently the Prime Minister of Canada and the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. Stéphane Dion is the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. I have created Clustered Word Clouds based on the profile articles linked to above.

They seem to do a pretty good job of getting the main characteristics of the two people across. I would have included clouds of the other party leaders as well but couldn't easily find objective written descriptions.

If you are Canadian, make sure you vote on Oct 14th !

Clustered Word Clouds for Books

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2008

I have made a few changes to the Clustered Word Clouds that I introduced yesterday. I improved the word clustering algorithm to discourage the creation of really large clusters. The layout algorithm has also been changed to be more efficient and it seems to give better results as well. These changes were made to make my tool more suitable for summarizing the content of larger documents. The clustered word clouds for a few books are shown below. Click on any image to see a larger version.

Clustered Word Clouds

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2008

Tag clouds have become a commonplace method of illustrating the popular words used in a text and do a good job of communicating the gist of what the text is about. The tag cloud below was generated by the wonderful Wordle from the text of 'I Have a Dream' by Martin Luther King Jr. Many people familiar with the famous speech would likely recognize it from this cloud of words. Wordle provides lots of options to control colors, fonts, and the style of layout and produces an excellent result.

I Have a Dream - Martin Luther King Jr.

One critical drawback of tag clouds is that the words are scrambled (or sometimes positioned strictly by frequency) and one cannot tell from the cloud which words were actually used together in the original text. One powerful line from the speech is: little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. The key words from this sentence appear in the tag cloud above but they are so disconnected visually that the meaning is completely scrambled.

I think we can do better. I developed Word Association Clouds a few months back to allow the use of the familiar tag cloud style layout to navigate related words in a text. Why not use word 'relatedness' to control positioning in a tag cloud layout ? Here is my first attempt below.

I partitioned the words into clusters based on how often they were used near each other in the text. I then positioned the words in the largest clusters near each other and used color to emphasize the structure. It's a bit tricky to position them with an algorithm so that the groups stay together and the overal layout is compact so there are a few more gaps than I'd like. I think, overall, that it came out pretty well.

Presidential Debate

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Wed, 08 Oct 2008

I have added the Presidential debate on Oct 7 to the interactive transcript analyzer. The static image shown below is a bit blurry but gives an idea of what was discussed. I've kept in the word counts on the right this time since many people find that the most interesting part.

static image only - click to use the interactive application

A few simple observations:

US VP Debate

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Fri, 03 Oct 2008

Last night was the US VP debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin. I've taken the words from the debate and added them to my interactive transcript analyzer. The static image shown below gives an idea of what was discussed.

static image only - click to use the interactive application

A few simple observations: