JK Keller

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:
  Reply to JK

  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.

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:
  Reply to JK

  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.

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!

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:
  Reply to JK

  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.