Jonathan Corum for The New York Times examines word usage by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union addresses and the words used by Republican candidates in their debates. Many of you will be happy to know that no word clouds were harmed in the making of this graphic.
If you don't watch the candidate debates — and let's face it, that's just about everyone — you pretty much miss everything, except for stuff like Rick Perry forgetting agency names. Politilines, by Periscopic, lets you see what the candidates talked about each night.
The left column lists top issues, the middle shows words used, and the right column shows candidates. Roll over any word or name to see who talked about what or what was talked about by whom.
The method:
We collected transcripts from the American Presidency Project at UCSB, categorized them by hand, then ranked lemmatized word-phrases (or n-grams) by their frequency of use. Word-phrases can be made of up to five words. Our ranking agorithm accounts for things such as exclusive word-phrases - meaning, it won't count "United States" twice if it's used in a higher n-gram such as "President of the United States."
While still in beta, the mini-app is responsive and easy to use. The next challenge, I think, is to really show what everyone talked about. For example, click on education and you see Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, and Rick Perry brought those up. Then roll over the names to see the words each candidate used related to that topic. You get some sense of content, but it's still hard to decipher what each actually said about education.
Recently visited Bank Street Arts (find it here) and discovered this wonderful Artists Book Prize with some really brilliant experimental one of a kind books.
'The Sheffield International Artist’s Book Prize is an open submission exhibition, held in conjunction with, and as part of, the Off
the Shelf Festival, which takes place in Sheffield during the months of
October and November.' http://bankstreetarts.com/exhibitions/sheffield-artists-book-prize/
Its the 3rd International Book Prize and with over 170 entries is comprehensive. I love little fanzines but these are something different, not always the most interesting content in some but the look and the craft is great and they are open for you to fan through at your leisure. Some of the bindings are works of art in themselves.
I remembered there used to be an art book sort of convention at Dean Clough in Halifax, but it sort of faded. I discovered upon chatting with the director at bank street this is because the curator/organiser of this left to join an MA programme at Manchester... probably why.
Looked great, unfortunately couldn't stay as long as I'd have liked, find out more: http://artistsbookprize.co.uk/
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Paper Works, 'a touring exhibition from Flow Gallery in London, features a host of internationally acclaimed artists whose work all harnesses the sensitivity of the hand-made object. Fragility and transience are the immediate connotations which resonate in the use of paper as a medium for creating three-dimensional form. Single sheets are either reworked or
pulped by the artists to form visually striking pieces.'
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| From Photo works |
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| From Photo works |
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| From Photo works |
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Love 'em or hate 'em, tag clouds, or the more recent incarnation, Wordles, are everywhere (especially in slide presentations). Well, Wordle wasn't enough. I mean, you can't even make shapes with it. Gees. That's where Tagxedo comes in. It works pretty much just like Wordle, except you have one more option. You can select from a variety of shapes to arrange your words into. Score.
Most common words in toy adverts, split by gender. From The Achilles Effect.
Unsurprising results – but still worth tutting over.
See them rendered in Wordle too – boys & girls.
A “consensus-cloud” of most mentioned titles from various book polls & top 100 lists. For The Guardian.
An updated version from my book. Data and analysis here: http://bit.ly/BooksEveryone
If you likee, you can purchase a print-it-yourself high-quality PDF in our store.
Want to see your real dialogue as art, then visualise it as a sound wavelength.
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With Google’s new tool Ngram Viewer, you can visualise the rise and fall of concepts across 5 million books and 500 years!
FUN!
I’ve boshed out a few quick experiments. Got any more?
Walk: Poem Pictures 2010 is a beautifully bound and lovely exploration/combination of words and drawings from Ian Mcmillan & Iain Nicholls.
I love these, a visual map, dialogue of their local area. very abstract, quirky collection of drawings and words combined. There are a few and suggest you try contact the creators to see if they have made any more books. Really plays with the space like Mallarme and abstract.
Concrete Poetry. They also eloquently describe their process.
Ian used to say as young lad ' "I'm going in the garden to think"
The garden didnt really help the thinking, though it was more the walking helped and still helps my creative process. Thinking somehow doesnt feel like the right word, its a kind of drifting or dreaming. Somehow the mind is going for a walk as well as the legs'
Ian Mcmillan, http://www.ian-mcmillan.co.uk
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