Text visualisation: two approaches September 16, 2008

Information Design Association evening meeting.

This meeting will look at ways to visualise the structure of text. The two speakers bring different approaches to a similar issue:

Stefanie Posavec: "'Writing Without Words' was the project completed for my final year on the MA Communication Design course at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London. The intention of this body of work was to explore various methods of visualising literature without using words. I wanted to find a way of communicating the complexity found in literature as well as highlight the similarities and differences in the writing styles of various authors.The structure of a novel, punctuation, parts of speech, and words per sentence were used to generate the final complex patterns.
Any piece of literature can be visualised using these approaches, but I chose to focus on the novel On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, because of its importance to me growing up in Denver, Colorado – a key city within the novel."

Piotr Michura (a doctoral student at Reading University):
"Text visualization is a term coined to describe the application of information visualization techniques to textual material. It is defined as an attempt to reveal structures of texts analyzed by computer applications and present them in a meaningful way. It allows the researcher to track patterns of data otherwise difficult to extract from the multitude of data produced by a computer. Using text mining tools the researcher can extract specific information, find unpredicted relationships or deviations from usual patterns, find gaps, and generally explore the data. The outcome is the creation, validation, or rejection of novel interpretations of literary texts. There is a constantly growing amount of textual material available for literary researchers in forms of digital archives, libraries, collections. Within the community of literary scholars dealing with these kind of resources there is a growing interest in applications able to support complex tasks, which go far beyond merely accessing, searching, and retrieving relevant documents from the collections."

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