Shaped Word Cloud: Canada

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Wed, 01 Jul 2009

Happy Canada Day ! This is a Shaped Word Cloud created from the text of approximately 168,000 tweets containing the word 'canada'. The tweets were gathered over an 11 month period from July 31, 2008 to June 30, 2009.

Basically, the larger the word the more frequently it appears in the text. Stop words were discarded. I also adjusted the size based on the relative frequency of the word in the canada dataset versus a baseline dataset containing tweets about india and china. A word like 'country' or 'travel' is used approximately the same for canada as for india and china and so will be de-emphasized. Words like 'hockey' , 'canadian', 'snow' and place names within canada will appear bigger. Because of the baseline content the result will not properly reflect any strong associations between canada and india or canada and china. As usual you can click on a word to see the current twitter search results.

Word Search: Canada Map

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009

Here is another Shaped Word Search in honour of Canada Day tomorrow, July 1st. This one is in the shape of a map of Canada and uses Provinces, Territories, and cities in the word list. Click on the image or here for the PDF version.

Feel free to print this in any newspaper or magazine. I only ask that you keep the reference to http://neoformix.com and that you send me an email letting me know.

Click on the image to download a hi-res PDF version suitable for printing

Word Search: Maple Leaf

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009

In honour of Canada Day tomorrow, July 1st, I have created a Shaped Word Search with a maple leaf design and words I associate with Canada. I improved my tool slightly to sort the words in alphabetical order so it is more convenient to look them up. Thanks to Joe S. for the suggestion. Click on the image or here for the PDF version.

Feel free to print this in any newspaper or magazine. I only ask that you keep the reference to http://neoformix.com and that you send me an email letting me know.

Click on the image to download a hi-res PDF version suitable for printing

Word Portrait: Michael Jackson

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2009

Here is a Word Portrait of Michael Jackson created from the titles of many of his top songs.

Click on the image to see a larger version

Twitter Venn: Celebrity Deaths

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2009

Here is a Venn Diagram made with Twitter Venn that shows the relative frequency of tweets made about the recent deaths of three celebrities - Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, and Ed McMahon. This analysis was done around 7am EST today and the absolute numbers for tweets/day will certainly increase as more people in the US come online. I expect the proportions among the various combination regions to stay roughly the same.

A couple of points of interest:

• Celebrity interest ranked by number of tweets is Michael > Farrah > Ed with ratios 62:6:1
• Ed was mentioned together with both Michael and Farrah more often than he was by himself

To explore the data using the interactive application click on the image below or this link: Twitter Venn for #michaeljackson, #farrahfawcett, and #edmcmahon.

Twitter Employee Clusters

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2009

Here is a different view of the relationships between the Twitter employee accounts first presented in this post. I measured the similarity between all the twitter employee accounts based on the overlap in vocabulary used in their last 200 tweets. A clustering algorithm was then used to group them together based on the pairwise similarity scores. The algorithm was tuned to limit clusters to have a maximum of 8 members.

The image below was created from the cluster members data, the similarity between clusters, and the similarity within each cluster. To minimize line clutter I am only drawing a connection if it is one of the top 2 strongest for either end node. The clustering and layout code is based on what I used for the Toronto Twitter Community project but has been recently enhanced to support some new client work.

Here is the PDF version of the Twitter Employee Clusters.

Shaped Word Search - Twitter

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2009

Here is another example of a Shaped Word Search. This one uses a Twitter Bird as the image and a list of words related to twitter. I also experimented a bit with adding distractors in order to make the puzzle more difficult. There are a couple of partial matches for each word mixed in to the letter matrix. Click on the image or here for the PDF version.

Click on the image to download a hi-res PDF version suitable for printing

A Shaped Word Search - Malta

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2009

I celebrated Father's Day this weekend with my wife's parents. While there, I spent a frustrating and unsuccessful 15 minutes looking for one of the few remaining words in a giant word search my father-in-law was working on. We found out later by checking online that there was an error and the word wasn't even present in the puzzle!

Much more enjoyable was the hour or so we spent doing a virtual tour of Malta using Google Earth. My father-in-law was born there and we had great fun zooming in with the aerial views finding the house where he lived, the church where he was baptized, etc. We were also able to easily see wonderful pictures of the many famous churches and natural features like the Blue Grotto. It's a beautiful and fascinating place and I'd love to visit sometime.

Well, the ideas of Malta, word search puzzles, and the usual mishmash from my coding projects mixed together in my brain while I was sleeping and I woke up early realizing I could easily write a tool to create 'Shaped Word Search Puzzles'. Basically, I can take a template image and a list of words and automatically construct a word search puzzle shaped and coloured to match the image.

The first example is below and uses a Maltese Cross with a list of words related to Malta. Most of the words are place names but there are a few other things mixed in as well. For example, Pastizzi are one of my favourite Maltese foods.

Click on the image to download a hi-res PDF version suitable for printing

IranElection Tweets Phrase Net

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Sat, 20 Jun 2009

I have uploaded the set of tweets I used to create the Iran Election Word Cloud to the wonderful Many Eyes and created a Phrase Net visualization for the data. This image below shows the net for the pattern word1 and word2. So, for example, the arrow connecting 'police' to 'riot' means there were lots of instances of the phrase 'police and riot'.

Static image of the phrase net for #IranElection Tweet Data (see below for interactive version)

See below for the interactive version.

Iran Election Tweet Narrative II

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Sat, 20 Jun 2009

I have updated my Tweet Narrative about the Iran election. This one uses 141,000 tweets from the time period June 14-20th, 2009. I have also improved the algorithm that selects the characteristic tweets. The changes are difficult to describe succinctly but did reduce the number of tweets that started with 'RT'. This helps meet my primary goal of constructing a readable summary of the content. For this analysis I also only counted the first 10 tweets from any particular account which helps prevent the tweets from a few individual accounts from dominating the results.

Iran Election Word Cloud

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2009

This is a Shaped Word Cloud created from the text of approximately 84,000 tweets containing the term #iranelection. The larger the word the more frequently it appears in the text. As usual you can click on a word to see the current twitter search results.

Feel free to follow JeffClark on Twitter to get more updates on my work.