I created my first visualization today for the project. Keeping things simple I plotted word usage count as a particle graph. (I also settled on the term protoBits).
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 😉 )
