Visualise This! + Amazon Concordance and Text Stats
1. Data Visualization: Modern Approaches <http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/02/data-visualization-modern-approaches/> "Let's take a look at the most interesting modern approaches to data visualization as well as related articles, resources and tools." A selection: * Musicovery <http://www.musicovery.com/> "displays music taste connections and lets you listen to the song and browse through similar songs." Select genres and mood settings: Dark <-> Positive + Energetic <-> Calm * MusicMap - Visual Music Search Application <http://www.dimvision.com/musicmap/> "connections are represented as connected lines; they create a web" Appears to use Amazon's catalogue search and "explore similar items" facilities. To start, click on "NEW SEARCH" and enter an artist or an album. * Elastic Lists <http://well-formed-data.net/experiments/elastic_lists/> "demonstrates the 'elastic list' principle for browsing multi-facetted data structures. You can click any number of list entries to query the database for a combination of the selected attributes. The approach visualizes relative proportions (weights) ofmetadata by size and visualizes characteristicness of a metadata weight by brightness." * Newsmap <http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/> "an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. The size of data blocks is defined by their popularity at the moment." I posted this to the B-List 3 years ago. * Voyage <http://rssvoyage.com/> "an RSS-feader which displays the latest news in the 'gravity area'. News can be zoomed in and out. The navigation is possible with a time- line." 2. Amazon Concordance and Text Stats Amazon has recently added Concordance and Text Stats for many books. When viewing a book's page, look for the "Inside This Book" section after the "Product Details". * Concordance shows the 100 most frequently used words a book. * Text Stats shows Readability, Complexity, Number of Characters, Words and Sentences, and "Words per Ounce"/"Words per Dollar". At the very easy level of readability is "The Cat in the Hat": <http://www.amazon.com/Cat-Hat-Seuss/dp/sitb-next/0679891110/ref=sbx_con> Interestingly, "Ulysses" by James Joyce is apparently not that as hard to read as its reputation would suggest, at least according to Amazon: <http://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-James-Joyce/dp/sitb-next/0679722769/ref=sbx_con>
