- Visual Abstraction – as a way to see past the narrative to reveal patterns and rhythms in the text;
- Focused data-mining – searching written texts for predetermined themes or ideas;
- Exploratory data-mining – searching written texts with undetermined focus, allowing focus to occur in the process of searching.
The one that struck me first was the sentence diagram, where a shape is drawn that is representative of the sentence composition in a text. How it works is that each line is drawn to represent the word length of a sentence. At the end of each sentence, a new line is drawn in a different direction. The first line starts with going to the right, then for each consequent line, you cycle through the 4 directions in a clockwise direction. The resulting image is a map that represents a rhythm (or lack thereof) in the sentence composition of a text.
First attempt. Drawn in Adobe Illustrator.
Since it was a lot of tedious labour to produce one, I've written a program in Processing to relieve the work of drawing it, however, I still need to do the word count manually. I'm pretty happy with what gets churned out. One of the limitations to my code is that it's still not perfect, just usable, which means I am limited to the flourishes I can incorporate into the lines.
Second attempt. Coded in Processing.
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