“…algorithms that allow computers to process and understand human languages…”

Does that sound awesome or what!?

What is sooo exciting about this phrase (to me) is the potential it suggests for deeper semantic visualization.

SNLP incorporates both: “…innovative probabilistic and machine learning approaches to NLP…”; this includes the ability to train the system, which is pretty spectacular!! I suspect in some circles this is old news, but to me the possibilities, in regard to my and Laura’s continued pursuits of strangeness, is mind-boggling.

Of course that being said, the software will take some time to understand and integrate in the existing work. Here’s an online version of the parser.

Ira

• Please Note: The Stanford parser returns a very abbreviated shorthand of the parts of speech (or perhaps it has been too long since I sat in an English class). Here’s the decoder:

            Digital artist Ira Greenberg has created for the Poetess archive several types of visualizations using XML-encoded documents.  The text we used is Felicia Hemans’s poem “Domestic Affections.”  The first visualization is a word fountain.  Based on word count, this dynamic picture alphabetizes the words and shoots up water: the higher the water, the greater number of times that word appears in the poem.  The highest water spurts correspond to words such as “the” and “a,” so we are really interested in this middle range.  If one scrolls over it, the word appears on top. 

As is visible here, in “poetess” poetry, “death” is prominent: “Domestic Affections” describes a woman’s desire to have her genius recognized as such, allegedly with fatal consequence. 

Here you see the cursor discovering in higher spurts of water “she, serene, shade, shadowy, seraph-dreams,” a rather nice list of attributes for what she needs to be and why death might therefore be needed to neutralize a woman’s intellect.

            Another visualization crated by Greenberg is what I call an elocutionary diagram.  

What you see here is of course a still from an animated visualization.  Here a worm-like creature crawls through the poem – through “Domestic Affections” – pausing at each punctuation mark for an amount of time determined by the mark’s relative punctuating force.  A comma generates a curvature in the  arthropod’s body, an exclamation point causes it to stop for a longer period of time and so its tail crashes into its head generating a series of large V shapes.  Here we see, in other words, the poem’s elocutionary force pictured as movement through time.  Why do Vs cluster and clatter here, why gently rolling comma-lulls there?

            Finally Greenberg developed a color wheel visualization based on positive (red), negative (blue), and neutral (gray) terms.

Concentric rings moving out represent each line in the poem from beginning to end.  Here we see its emotional ups and downs, how they cluster, contrast, compare.  It is interesting to see that our perception of the color gray or neutrality is affected by the colors surrounding it, just as a peaceful moment after being almost hit by a bus differs from a peaceful moment when one wakes up after pleasant dreams.  One sees here not only where positive terms dominate and where sadness prevails, but how such alterations affect one another.

Paper / Power Point

Links:

Linear Visualization

Radial Visualization

Link to syntactic visualization

Link to Visualization

My process: All the words in the poem were sorted alphabetically, and duplicate words were counted. I plotted the unique words along the x-axis and the duplicate words along the y-axis. Each particle initially occupies a unique position, but to keep things more interesting I made them dynamic and added a random jitter to their x-position upon impact with the ground. Although there is acceleration along the y-axis, there is no gravity/friction–so the system never stabilizes. Moving the mouse over a particle reveals the word plotted. The higher particle columns represent the more common words. Particles turn orange once they’ve been rolled over.

My goal will be to try to create a unique visualization (of increasing complexity) each day leading up to the conference, (so please stop by tomorrow )

The problem is not actually what to do, but rather what to do in the next 2 weeks, prior to MLA. I wish I could just explore this material without the burden of deadline. This was supposed to be how I was going to spend my sabbatical this fall–yeah, right!

My thoughts about the visualization process today are to begin with single cell creatures and work my way up. I’ve been thinking about a name for these fundamental organisms: microbots, micro-protobytes, microbytes, protobits, protobots. My thought for these initial creatures is single pixels that bounce in 1 dimension: distance = word usage. I know this is fairly boring, but I feel like I need to begin simply and fundamentally. I will post a few Processing sketches of these initial tests next.

Fortunately I have something to write about, as I am beginning a very interesting collaboration with Laura on the visualization of 18th century romantic poetry-a subject I am severely ignorant about. Here is a recent note I sent to Laura:

Sent Dec 12, 2007

… Some initial thoughts I want to share:

1. I’ve been thinking and working on parsing:
Thus far I’ve been able to input the poem and generate some relatively simple statistical data about overall syntax and word usage (i.e. number of occurrences of terms). I could (and will) parse deeper and collect phoneme groups, prefixes, suffixes, etc as well. In addition, I really want more semantic “meat”, so I’ve downloaded WordNet ( a “lexical database for the English Language” developed at Princeton). WordNet should (I’m hoping) allow me to query all terms against a simplified semantic interface. For example, I would like to be able to identify any term that relates to birth or death or love or hate, etc. This seems the only logical way to approach mapping semantics. Of course, once I collect buckets of terms based on these more general concepts, finer semantic filtering could occur recursively (man that sounds pretentious-put it on the poster “fer sure”!). For example, all the terms that semantically connect to birth, could be further separated–giving forth of an idea, creating a life-form, heritage, lineage, noun vs verb, etc., etc.

If time permits (hah!) it would be good to find some other dictionary api’s; for example aural data (relating to phonemes), etymology, etc.

Once all this mess of data is collected and statistics are generated, I’ll connect the data to a visualization tool. For now, I’m thinking about using my protobyte forms as sort of a conceptual armature (genus perhaps?). I would love to have the poem visualizations/protobytes motile in 3D (ultimately evolving)-–poetry creating virtual life!!!

This was great fun — y’all come next time!!

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lisa

First, I have been incredibly amazed, in a dumb sort of way, by the spirit / body connection in computers: I just can’t see how turning on a switch makes a program execute, a program that will in turn operate little on / off switches on a microchip via 0s and 1s.  Ira said in response to this problem that it’s really no more amazing than what happens when you turn on a light switch.  Here is a relevant passage from Manovich that Warner quotes and explicates:

In retrospect, the shift from a material object to a signal accomplished by electronic technologies represents a fundamental conceptual step towards computer media.  In contrast to a permanent imprint in some material, a signal can be modified in real time by passing it through a filter or filters . . . . [A]n electronic filter can modify the signal all at once . . . .  [A]n electronic signal does not have a singular identity — a particular qualitatively different state from all other possible states. . . .  In contrast to a material object, the electronic signal is essentially mutable. . . . This mutability of electronic media is just one step away from the ‘variability’ of new media. . . . Put differently, in the progression from material object to electronic signal to computer media, the first shift is more radical than the second.  (132-133)

Here is the really interesting part, though, about the shift from electronic mutability to computer variability: the change happens through software.  I remember sitting in my office with a tech guy right after getting my second laptop, trying and trying to figure out why we couldn’t get any sound — and then I found a volume button on the side of the machine.  My new laptop has no such button.  Here is Warner explaining and quoting Manovich:

The increase in range of variation in the digital is accounted for by two factgors: “modern digital computers separate hardware and software” (so for example, changing the volume will just be a software change) and second, “because an object is now represented by numbers, that is, it has become computer data that can be modified by software.  In short a media object becomes ‘soft’ — with all the implications contained in this metaphor” (133).  The mutability of TV (with hue, brightness, vertical hold, etc.) becomes the much wider range of variability for display of a page in a browser window.  (Warner 11).

Both Warner and Manovich argue that what’s significant about the new media is not in fact computers but computers-running-software, that it really doesn’t matter what media instantiates the software at all.  Here’s Manovicth:

[T]he fundamental quality of new media that has no historical precedent [is] programmability.  Comparing new media to print, photography, or television will never tell us the whole story.  For although from one point of view new media is indeed another type of media, from another it is simply a particular type of computer data, something stored in files and databases, retrieved and sorted, run through algorithms and written to the output device.  That the data represent pixels and that this device happens to be an output screen is beside the point. . . .  New media may look like media, but this is only the surface.  (47-48; qtd. Warner 14)

That smacks of idealism and transcendence: code is spirit, and matter / media doesn’t matter at all.  But somehow they are both trying to avoid that trend, analyzed so well by N. Katherine Hayles in her posthuman book.  I’m not sure how, but here is a paragraph in Warner dealing with the problem:

Although the phrase “the computer running software” is redundant, it offers a way to emphasize the way a relatively immaterial thing — software — invades and dematerializes its supposedly hard home, what is conventionally called “hardware” but what we sometimes mistakenly identify as “the computer.”  This is a mistake, not just because hardware needs software the way, by analogy, we might say that the human body needs the communications media of neurons, enzymes and electric signals as a condition of life.  From the beginning of computing, even the hardest components of design — the arrangement of circuits and vacuum tubes, the code embedded on read-only memory, and microprocessors made of silicon — were designed to embed “logic blocks” (like “and,” “or,” “invert”) and algorithms first expressed as software.  In other words, there is a very real sense in which the computer is software all the way down.

A chapter of Manovich’s book that Warner spends a lot of time analyzing is called “Selection,” and it is about how software has made creating into a process of selecting and filtering — a fettering of creativity that may be akin to transforming a writer to a mere reader or worse, critic, assembler of other people’s words into sentences and ideas (she wrote nervously, looking away from her own postings).  This reminds me of Maeda’s attack on the new software programs for programming, as well as Ira’s refusal to let his Flash students click on any of the menu options in the “Actions” portion of Flash (he makes them write out the action script by hand).