This project seeks to strip away the dominant, semantic aspects of a text and explores and expresses its purely formal qualities, the underlying skeleton of the text. textApart is a Processing application that visualizes the structure, rhythm, and phonetic patterns of a collection of words. TtextApart displays the selected text in a series of views, where the text is abstracted into shapes and patterns. Stacks of word-shapes and identify repeaters, uncommon word-shapes swell and common word-shapes shrink. By comparing text, we can discover the differences and similarities in what’s hidden under the message– in the mechanics of the text. In these examples, texts by Henry James and Brittany Spears are visualized and compared.

The Semantic Thermometer is a playful, visual way to display current local temperature data. The program takes a location and accesses up-to-the-minute weather information for that location, using Yahoo’s Weather API and a Where-On-Earth Id. The current temperature reading for that location is translated from a number to a corresponding descriptive word (for example 77 degrees Fahrenheit would be translated as “warm” and 24 degrees Fahrenheit would be “frigid”) from a set of words I defined. The program sends the word to the Flickr API, where it searches for and retrieves the latest user-generated photos tagged with that word. These photos are displayed in a grid on the screen, with a new photo added every few seconds to show the current local temperature in images. When the user rolls over an image, the descriptive word appears. The Semantic Thermometer invents surprising and baffling new metaphors, as it works in the gap between a specific physical experience and the imprecise, complex language we use to describe it.

A visualization of all the geographical locations of Dairy Queen Shops in the USA, displayed as drips of melted ice cream on a hot sidewalk. This program was written in Processing.

All the Dairy Queens, Melting from zannahlou on Vimeo.