This was a bit of tangent for me, but working in javascript and remixing some code for Networks & Creativity resulted in the creation of multiple incarnations of a “Word Frequency Spiral” script. The first creates the spirals in photoshop and the second version uses D3.js, a data visualization library, to make an interactive, zoomable and pannable version from user input text.
The spiral uses basic trigonometry to determine the location of the elements and does some interesting rotation and frequency counting. The text size varies with the frequency of the words. The early versions you see here don’t use any sort of word filtering, so the results are less interesting than they could be. The interactive version allows the user to filter the top 50 most common words in the english language and allows you to toggle a variant of a Porter-Stemming algorithm to group like terms.
This whole project is still in a very prototype-stage, but the results are somewhat interesting. Pardon the currently very ugly interactive version.
