– Anne Flamio
Comparing Bands through Visualizations
Class Blog 1
Favorite Bands: Fusion Table
https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1dI6Z70fDzW69QPh5_qHik1a4-Ph2AC_Lp_KBxNlE
Google Fusion Table
Spreadsheet-
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fRKwutkVwuuuzWHhwKqXWLjyvwdlQ4Go3BZmV8zfFrk/edit?usp=sharing
Map of where each band is from:
Card image with the information for each band:
https://fusiontables.googleusercontent.com/fusiontables/embedviz?viz=CARD&q=select+*+from+10hkHFC1YJ3SG2LH1YYSQYM3CtdgxQkPmQ-rmbIyN&tmplt=1&cpr=2
Bar graph showing the average number of albums for each genre:
Pie chart showing number of albums in each genre:
Pie chart showing each band and their amount of albums:
Network visualization of genre and number of albums:
Scandal in Bohemia wordcloud
I used the Sherlock Holmes story “A Scandal in Bohemia” and the visualization tool Wordle to create a wordcloud based on the story. What I noticed about my particular wordcloud is that it has a sort of circular pattern to it, as apposed to the normal seemingly “random” assortment of words. The smaller words are on the outer rim of the circle, and the words get larger and more condensed towards the center. Unlike my classmates, I did not remove the word “Holmes” from my wordcloud, because if someone unfamiliar with this assignment would glance at the wordcloud, seeing the word Holmes would give them a sense of what text the wordcloud was showcasing. I also noted the difference in sizes between “Holmes” and “Sherlock”. While Holmes is seen almost instantly, you might have to do a bit of searching to find Sherlock. I find that interesting due to in today’s standards, especially in stories, characters and people are often addressed by their first name. The Sherlock Holmes stories, as we know, are presented by Watson, not Sherlock. But it is odd that even Watson, the person arguably the closeted to him, calls him by his last name instead of by his first.
The Adventure of the Dancing Men
For a change of pace, I read the Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Return of Sherlock Holmes collection. I used the Voyant word cloud tool to visualize the story. The first version featured the words “holmes,” “mr,” and “mrs” that I deemed unimportant to the story. I realize now that, though “holmes” is a bit obvious and takes up a lot of room, the other words I listed indicate relationships which may be important to the overall story. Please bear this in mind as I continue without “mr” and “mrs” (because I took this screenshot on a different computer that allows screenshots and so I will be using this visualization):
The loss of “mr” and “mrs” may not be so terrible, after all. These “words” don’t modify any others to indicate which name they belong to, which I believe is a fault of the word cloud. If I were looking at this visualization and trying to find character names, they are spaced throughout and it is impossible to determine which first name goes with which last name, or if each name is even related. However, one can see that “husband” and “wife” are featured in the word cloud, so a marriage is implied. “Norfolk” also shows the setting of the story. While some related words point to a plot line — for example, “bullet,” “shot,” and “fired” suggest that a character has been or will be shot in the story — other related words like “man,” “men,” and “face” fail to create an image of just what the “Dancing Men” part of the title means. In reality, the dancing men are drawn stick figures used as a code to send messages to one of the characters.
The word cloud has the potential to give the viewer a lot of information about a document, but in some cases it may fall short of its purpose. The words used in this word cloud are no true representation of what occurs in the story. Looking at the picture, I can see that there is a husband and wife, a few named characters, a setting, a letter, and someone gets shot. This does not answer the question of who the dancing men are and, since the story is named after them, this is a lot of crucial information not being relayed.
Though I like the aesthetics and intention of the word cloud, I can understand why some people would be opposed to its existence, like Jacob Harris from the “Harmful” article we read seems to be. A narrative may be impossible to find in a cluster of frequently used words with no specific meaning; therefore, the word cloud may not be effective or properly convey the meaning of the document it represents.
I used the program Voyant to create this specific word cloud for the scripture The Adventure of the Speckled Band. The word cloud is a very good way at figuring out how many times words are used to create a story. Pretty fascinating if you think about it; not only can we read a story but see how many times each word was used?
When I was younger, I strictly remember being in class while reading a book attempting to count how many times “the” or “and” were placed within a piece of writing. Although there was much fascination, little did I know that now we have a much easier way of figuring it out.
With that said, being able to read these word clouds, we can see which words are used the most. Although, these are very much helpful they are sometimes not that accurate (Harris). Harris stated: I created a word cloud of Tea Party feelings about Obama, and the two largest words were implausibly “like” and “policy,” mainly because the importuned word “don’t” was automatically excluded (Harris). Technically, yes word clouds give you a gist of how many times a word is used, but what it does not do correctly is give off what the story is about.
My word cloud, the first few times I did it- the main words that were used were THE and AND. Yes, these words help link a sentence, but how does that even relate to what the story is about? I had to fix it a few times in order for this specific word cloud to make sense.
Lastly, it is actually pretty cool to paste a whole text and for it to turn into what we call a word cloud. Not only is the shape awesome, but the color is awesome too. I had my fair share of problems with this specific “word cloud” thing- but once I got the hang of it, I started to copy and paste texts that I have read previously before and liked. Let me tell you, that was super cool.
Word Cloud
I used voyant-tools to create this word cloud. The main thing I noticed about this word cloud was the amount of describing words that were included the cloud. I was expecting to see “Holmes” or “London” appear as the largest words. I take this observation though as a sign that the story itself is very descriptive and pays close attention to detail. However, it doesn’t reveal much about the plot of the story which makes it not the best source to use.
A Case of Identity Word Cloud
I used the visualization tool Voyant in order to create a World Cloud for the Sherlock Homes short story, A Case of Identity.
Since it is known that the World Cloud is a visualization of a Sherlock Holmes story, I added “Holmes” to the list of stop words, as well as “said.” These words, though used the most often, were irrelevant to the real analysis of the World Cloud.
Though little can be told about the plot of A Case of Identity from this visualization alone, it helps in pointing out who the story mainly revolves around. The words “Hosmer,” “Windibank,” and “Angel” appear 23, 20, and 19 times respectively throughout the text. Readers could infer that these are the main characters and upon reading the full text would discover that “Hosmer Angel” and “Windibank” are actually the same person.
Next to “Holmes,” which appeared 28 times in the text and was deleted from the Word Cloud, the next most often used word was “little.” This was surprising, as having read the text before creating this visualization, the word “little” seems to have nothing at all to do with the plot of the story. Upon further analysis, however, it can be seen that “little,” though not dealing much with the plot, is always used for a particular reason. Often times, it is used to describe Miss Mary Sutherland. Since she is a woman, she is portrayed as being more dainty, and therefore things about her are little, from her “little problem” to her “little handkerchief.” Watson also uses this term to describe Miss Sutherland’s appearance when Holmes asks him too, pointing out the “little black jet ornaments” on her jacket and the “little purple plush” on her dress. Holmes even goes as far as to comment on her “little income.” This use of the world little to describe Miss Mary Sutherland can be interpreted as a way to show readers that though it’s Miss Sutherland’s case that needs solving, Sherlock sees her as just another woman with a “little” and “trite” problem, and therefore, readers should see her this way as well.
While the comments Sherlock sometimes makes can be viewed undoubtedly sexist, I also think it’s important to look at the context of these stories. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote them, this generalization and view of women was the norm. It is only now, reading these stories in the 21st century, that we can point out what it is wrong with some comments made. Back then, this kind of description of women was not seen as an issue. It’s interesting to think, if Word Clouds were used long ago, if the same amount of analysis would be put into the word “little” or even how women were depicted in these Sherlock Holmes’ adventure stories at all.
Scandal in Bohemia with Voyant
I used the digital tool Voyant to create a word cloud of the classic Sherlock Holme’s case Scandal in Bohemia. The cloud’s color scheme doesn’t have an identifiable pattern in correlation with the words frequencies, but you are able to figure out which words are the most frequent in the story once you filter out the stop words. You can figure out which word was used more often by its size in the word cloud. The bigger the words are the more frequent they are and vice versa. The color of the cloud has no real value because it is random colors but it would be useful if the words was colored to follow a set pattern. For example, all of the words that are names could be red, all of the verbs yellow, and the nouns blue.
I think that this tool is useful because it helps you get the gist of the story before you even read it. I don’t think that this tool should be used if you’re looking for details from the story. Looking at the world cloud I’m able to analyze that the king is involved and it has something to do about photographs because the word photographs has been mentioned 21 times and the word king has been mentioned 17 times.
I used two custom stop words which were “sherlock” and “said”. I chose sherlock because his name would be mentioned a lot since the story is about him and i chose said because it didn’t hold any informative value.
Here is my cloud and frequency data:
The Adventure of the Speckled Band
Generated by http://www.jasondavies.com/wordcloud/
As my favorite Sherlock Holmes story of all time, seeing key words visualized in a word cloud helped me to focus on some key points that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was trying to make. I found that many words in this word cloud appeared to be very grim, (i.e Death) and it is often easy to forget the grim nature of this story. Word clouds are an incredible tool in completely understanding the way a work is written.