Boing Boing Word Trends

Last Updated Thu, 31 Jan 2008

Boing Boing Word Trends is an interactive tool that shows the trends in word usage over time and word associations for the 500 latest posts from the weblog Boing Boing. See below for brief instructions.

The application may take 10-15 seconds to load the first time you use it. You may also need to click on it once to activate it depending on your browser/operating system combination.

To view this content, you need to install Java from java.com

The left side of the tool display shows what I call a Word Association Cloud for each of the four words of interest. Visually, a Word Association Cloud looks like a standard Tag Cloud except the topmost word is made distinct in some manner. Here I use a faint block of color behind it. Rather than using font size to represent a simple word frequency the size here illustrates how good the correlation is with the primary word. You can click on any of the primary words to enter edit mode and change it to whatever you wish. Or you can simply click on one of the associated terms to make it the new primary term.

The bar chart shows the number of stories (out of the latest 500) that contain the various terms or combinations of the terms. For example, the bar with a small blue and small red circle beside it shows the number of posts that have both the red and blue words in it.

One of the circle labels in the bar chart is selected - the one with the white rectangle around it. Below the graph the stories that match this bar are shown in reverse chronological order. You can hover over these stories to see the description or click on them to view them in another browser tab.

Incidentally, I'm available for data analysis or visualization projects if anybody is interested in working together. I live near Toronto, Canada but I'm open to projects done remotely. I would be happy with projects in size from a few days to a few months of work. Send me an email if you are interested.

This application requires java to run and was constructed using Processing. The data is coming from Google Blog Search. As always, feedback is welcome !

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