Yet another baby!

Many Eyes has just released a brand new baby for us to delight ourselves with. We're all very familiar with the Word Tree and the Tag Cloud and Wordle features and I for one couldn't help to wonder what would happen if the clouds met the trees. Well, always one step ahead, folks at VCL have answered that question! Let's have a look...

When to use a Phrase Net

A phrase net diagrams the relationships between different words used in a text. It uses a simple form of pattern matching to provide multiple views of the concepts contained a book, speech, or poem. [...] The program [draws] a network of words, where two words are connected if they appear together in a phrase of the form "X and Y"

How Phrase Net works

Phrase net analyzes a text by looking for pairs of words that fit particular patterns. You can specify this pattern by using asterisks as wildcard characters. For instance, the pattern "* and *" will match phrases like "play and sing" or "vexation and regret." Punctuation matters, so it will not match "left, and then". You can choose from some useful defaults or you can type your own patterns in the field below the list.

Once you've specified a pattern, the program will create a network diagram of the words it found as matches. Two words will be connected if they occurred in the same phrase. The size of a word is proportional to the number of times it occurred in a match; the thickness of an arrow between words tells you how many times those two words occurred in the same phrase. The color of a word indicates whether it was more likely to be found in the first of second slot of a pattern. The darker the word, the more often it appeared in the first position.

I personally this is one of the most customizable visualizations in Many Eyes, making it extremely easy to think outside of the box, find new patterns in data, analyze texts, words and books and, well, just plain have some fun! Users can tweak the filters, zoom in and out, pan, highlight, see occurrences of the words and/or pair of words, hide or show common words and even choose the universe of words shown in the visualization. Phrase Net can process up to a million words from a single free text input.
For more [better written, more complete and thorough] information, visit Phrase Net's page on Many Eyes.
Check out the live thing below this image. (You need Java enabled to run any visualization on Many Eyes)



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Turing Award

This is just something you should know about:

What a brilliant woman:

Liskov, the first U.S. woman to earn a PhD in computer science, was recognized for helping make software more reliable, consistent and resistant to errors and hacking. She is only the second woman to receive the honor, which carries a $250,000 purse and is often described as the “Nobel Prize in computing.”

I’m embarrassed to admit that I wasn’t more familiar with her work prior to reading about it in Tuesday’s Globe, but wow:

The latter day Ada herselfLiskov’s early innovations in software design have been the basis of every important programming language since 1975, including Ada, C++, Java and C#.

Liskov’s most significant impact stems from her influential contributions to the use of data abstraction, a valuable method for organizing complex programs. She was a leader in demonstrating how data abstraction could be used to make software easier to construct, modify and maintain…

In another contribution, Liskov designed CLU, an object-oriented programming language incorporating clusters to provide coherent, systematic handling of abstract data types. She and her colleagues at MIT subsequently developed efficient CLU compiler implementations on several different machines, an important step in demonstrating the practicality of her ideas. Data abstraction is now a generally accepted fundamental method of software engineering that focuses on data rather than processes.

This has nothing to do with gender, of course, but I find it exciting apropos of this earlier post regarding women in computer science.

Original post by Ben Fry

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... aaand we're back!

After nine grueling days of sunny beaches and great surfing conditions, I'm back at the office. Fresh and motivated, I've prepared a few posts in advance and I'll be publishing them in the next days so that I don't flood this blog with posts and make it so that most of them are missed.
Hang tight!

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Welcome to the world, Processing 1.0!

It only took 162 attempts (hey! It took Edison 1000 attempts to make the light bulb! shush!!!), but it's finally here: Processing 1.0!

There was even a press release for it last Monday in Cambridge and L.A., and it was well deserved. I'd explain what the project is, but Ben Fry - who is one of the authors - has already done a pretty good job...

"Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.

Processing is a free, open source alternative to proprietary software tools with expensive licenses, making it accessible to schools and individual students. Its open source status encourages the community participation and collaboration that is vital to Processing’s growth. Contributors share programs, contribute code, answer questions in the discussion forum, and build libraries to extend the possibilities of the software. The Processing community has written over seventy libraries to facilitate computer vision, data visualization, music, networking, and electronics." - Ben Fry

You can download it free here and find beautiful examples of usage here.
Hope you enjoy this, I certainly will!

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Talk on WPF and Silverlight

Folks, I'll be giving a talk on WPF and Silverlight development next week for the development team of Stefanini IT Solutions.
It'll be more like a crash course on the technology and what can be done with it.
It's going down at TecnoPUC next Tuesday and Thursday (11/2 & 11/4) form 6:30 PM to 8:30PM.

I'll be posting the results as well as some of the most interesting questions that might appear.
For those joining, I'll see you then!

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Coming scheadule

Critical time seems to be over at the office, leaving me some spare time for blogging. Having that said, I've decided to create a post scheadule to cover the vast range of subjects of my interest.

Given that I have quite a few blog RSS signatures on Visualization and weekends are full of interesting posts and publishings around the globe, Monday-Tuesday will be the days dedicated to Visualizations. My likes and dislikes, thoughs, wishes... What have you.

Todays (and probably will repeat itself) subject: Many Eyes
Although it's no secret that I've worked with the guys in Cambridge for a brief time in 06-07 winter, there will be time for talking about the tag cloud, wordle and all the other awesome tools available in the portal. This post is about their newest back-end change: Rails!

That's right, everything is now running on Ruby on Rails. On their newest post, Jesse brings out the big guns and points out the pros and cons on the choice and makes his point very objectively. Try it out for yourself and feel the difference.

Thumbs up for the time invested, guys!

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