Visualizing poetry with Synesketch

[brandondedicant]

Synesketch is a surprising innovation in visualization technologies.  It takes text and measures its emotion words to produce a visualization.  This link demonstrates it with an everyday conversation, and then with William Blake's Auguries of Innocence.

Below are the 6 basic emotion patterns.  From left to right and top to bottom: happiness, anger,

Comments

[lorele]

I tried the demo.

It's pretty trippy to watch it start -- and continue developing out the nuances of the text in different ways -- seeing where emphasis falls.

I don't get why it falls where it falls. I'm sure it has to do with quadrants or something.

[brandondedicant]

I couldn't get the demo to work on my macbook. :-(

[lorele]

Aww. I don't use Macintoshes -- doubtless they're effective, but they need money to upkeep. Have you tried running it under Mac's PowerPC/pseudo-Windows?

Maybe you can just get JRE -- Java Runtime Environment?

[lorele]

So, I downloaded the Java .JAR sample.

You have to bam the text you have in there before it goes for too long, and reboot it each time -- but I got some REALLY interesting results.

One of my poems got some really developed confetti lines, another four-line per stanza poem got some interesting angles, and sometimes it just did pretty spirals outwards -- but the circles are certainly the predominant ruling theme-effect.

Perhaps it's when the thought drifts off it doesn't make a real 'circle'.