Volumetric Redundancies

Flatland

Art of War
Visualization of Art of War

Frankenstein
Visualization of Frankenstein

Seven Discourses on Art
Visualization of Seven Discourses on Art

Been rendering various texts with the Language Visualizer v2 (aka ‘Volumetric Redundancies’).

This is a program I wrote that reads a source text and looks for words that are used repeatedly. The more the word is used, the larger its cube gets. Red cubes are words that are not unique, blue cubes are. The size of the rings is determined by the size of the paragraphs.

Added: 2003 Mar 27 @ 02:13
Updated: 2008 May 14 @ 02:48
Permalink
Leave Comment #15
Create Trackback #3
Track responses via RSS
Tags: 3d, computation, text, visualizations

16 Responses to “Volumetric Redundancies”

14 Comments

Track comments via RSS

On April 27th, 2007 at 10:33, Jeff said:

amazing,

i have many questions.
why are the most frequently used words congregated at the top? is the visualization not in the text’s page order? is the length of the column proportional to the length of the work? have you visualized any plays?

enjoying your art,
jeff
On April 30th, 2007 at 16:18, JK said:

Jeff:
why are the most frequently used words congregated at the top?
The text translates to a volume from top to bottom, thus the original instance of reused words will congregate towards the top of the volume.

is the visualization not in the text’s page order?
There is no delineation of the pages of text. My sources come from Project Gutenberg which does not cut the text up via pages. Also, this is supposed to visualize the structure of the text not the book.

is the length of the column proportional to the length of the work?
I would call it height, but yes.

have you visualized any plays?
No, but I have tried a poem and all I get is a really thin cylinder, which is less interesting to me. That’s a lie, the poem was a Shakespeare play. But the thin cylinder part is still true.
On May 4th, 2007 at 18:27, ROTT said:

Hey JK, would it be possible for me to use one of these as my page lay out for Myspace….If so how do i do it?? I love the tornados…..
thanks…. hugs
On June 22nd, 2007 at 04:23, Mandy said:

War of the Worlds resembles a spaceship beaming down at earth. Makes sense, I suppose. Nice program.
On January 3rd, 2008 at 04:15, Brad said:

That really is amazing, have you done any other books, and if so where can I find them?
On January 6th, 2008 at 04:03, JK said:

Brad: I have done a couple more books, but I no longer have a working 3d program that can deal with the file that the program outputs. I’d like to port this to processing at some point and open source it, but probably won’t have the time any time soon. Many other things on the plate at the moment.
On May 24th, 2008 at 08:52, Schoschie said:

This is fantastic. I’ve been toying around with word-lists extracted from plain texts as well, looking at the frequency distribution of words. This is a very ingenious way of visualizing that kind of data. Could it be made to run in real-time and maybe display the words/paragraphs as you mouse over them?
On May 26th, 2008 at 12:35, JK said:

Schoschie: I’m quite sure that someone could make it run real-time and display the textual information on mouseover. I imagine it would be somewhat processor intensive as we’re talking about tens of thousands of 3d cubes with associated meta content. While I probably won’t be attempting that anytime soon myself, as mentioned previously, I do hope to port this to processing at some point and let others input their own texts.
On August 19th, 2008 at 14:55, Jeff said:

I am a serious student of Bible codes and related topics. I think you have tapped into a potentially profound way to visually examine theometrics. Have any books of the Bible been examined using this method yet?
On August 23rd, 2008 at 15:56, JK said:

Jeff: Back when I first created this, I tried using the visualization system with the Bible, but it consistently crashed the application. As the project was done in a poor development environment, the Bible sort of over-extended the limits of the work. I hope to port this over to a more robust language some time in the future, and one of the first new works will definitely be the Bible.
On October 3rd, 2008 at 08:39, Anonymiter said:

This is beautiful! At first glance it was intriguing but didn’t look very special. Some shapes all piled in an odd tornado of a cylinder with a little color wasn’t too outstanding until I read the description and struggled to grasp what it all really meant. I’ve always enjoyed the ideas of all types of art but until I saw this piece I never felt that “connection” to the idea of something. Even just writing that though doesn’t explain the meaning of what this did for me… its simply… beautiful.

I seriously hope you don’t forget about this one. The idea of writing a paper with my Volumetric Redundancies plugin on the sidebar displaying in real-time shifting new cubes corresponding to the words already written that share the same letters as the word I’m typing makes me cry for a finished product. Oh… so many possibilities and ideas!!! Its great and to be honest the idea of such plugin reminds me of the eye candy thats been flooding the Linux community lately.

Anyways… just thought I’d share my take on it with you! Love the site and I hope to see more soon!
On October 23rd, 2008 at 13:22, Wil. said:

That’s amazing. How can one person think of all these ideas…I’m awestruck!
On November 3rd, 2008 at 14:26, Shane Kramer said:

JK,

I wrote you a long time ago regarding your artistic merits. Though I have a masters in Software Engineering I fear that the kind of artistic talent you possess cannot be taught.

A friend and I are planning a couple of data visualization centric Java projects. I wanted to ask you what you used to actually create the visualizations (I realize it was a long time ago). Do you recommend a specific suite or API?

Regards,
Shane Kramer
On November 11th, 2008 at 00:17, JK said:

Shane Kramer: I used Macromedia Director to parse the text and write an obj (3d) file. The obj file was then brought into 3DStudio Max for rendering. I would highly recommend not doing any visualizations this way.

If I were to do it again (and I may at some point), I would use Maya’s MEL scripting or some sort of scripting within Blender. Processing is always a good choice for any sort of graphic programming as well.

2 Trackbacks

Create Trackback #3

Trackback at January 17th, 2008 at 15:32
bioephemera.com » 3-D Textual Spirographs!
[...] . . or something like that. Courtesy of JK Keller, these Volumetric Redundancies represent the number of times a word appears in a given [...]
Trackback at March 11th, 2008 at 12:43
jk keller: living my life faster + more @ c71123.com. « shape + colour
[...] data visualizations and other programs that modify existing digital data to create art. In “Volumetric Redundancies” he wrote a program that scans a text for repeated words and uses the info create cyclonic [...]

JK Keller