Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Concordle and Many Eyes

Concordle - Not so pretty cousin of Wordle
Concordle lives at http://folk.uib.no/nfylk/concordle/ earlier: http://www.uib.no/people/nfylk/concordle/

SO I HAVE MANAGED TO UPSET THE TEMPLATE! Perhaps sometimes I will fix that. Does anybody know how?




Concordle and Many Eyes (as well as Concordle and Wordle )

What I call Concordle seems to be related to IBM's Many Eyes http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home
in particular
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/page/Tag_Cloud.html

It also seems that the "Double Concordle" (which is now just a test using "frames") at my
http://www.uib.no/people/nfylk/concordle_dev/double_concordle/
also does things similar to the IBM services - but as a Toy perhaps.

My service is that you can take the page with you, do anything with it, except of trying to misuse it somehow (do not quite know how, but .... ). Also, I am not trying to steal the ideas from Many Eyes, I simply followed the "Wordle Cloud idea" and played sometimes with "the Concordle"

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Concordle - Not so pretty cousin of Wordle ( October )

Concordle - Not so pretty cousin of Wordle
Concordle lives at www.uib.no/people/nfylk/concordle/

This is a picture gallery of wordles and concordles
The pictures of wordles are made by
Wordle

SO I HAVE MANAGED TO UPSET THE TEMPLATE! Perhaps sometimes I will fix that. Does anybody know how?

Disclaimer or Claimer: I am a physicist, not web developer.
Part of my motivation for this project is simply to learn JavaSript to a certain degree
necessary for my plans to do some graphics using Canvas and some simple teaching
examples using an approach similar to Concordle. This means: Simple "Rapid Prototyping"
style of programming; Rather richly commented code; You can see the code most of the time;

Another piece of motivation: I would like to have examples for the discussion of
the sad state of programming on this Planet. All the libraries, objects, version controls,
Visual Studio(s) and IDE system (integrating development environments) make the code
unavailable. Here is my tribute to spagheti code - but with comments.

Concordle is a TOY. But I hope that you will see its potential. New features kept coming
up - keeping me from my other work (a bit). Now concordle is in a stage I can live with.

I would like to have a Twin Concordle, where all functions are working for two parallel texts,
clicking on one will also do similar things in the other one (the concordance snippets) - and
these could be seen beside each other. But for this I think the code should be a bit redesigned.

As you can see in the code, it just contains copies and copies of copies of code snippets and
functions. This should be filtered into smaller number of functions with slightly more general
functionality - and after all - a little bit of code design.


Ultimate open source

At this address
http://www.uib.no/people/nfylk/concordle_dev/
you can click on
concordle_opened.html

It will download Concordle into a HTML/JavaScript Editor.
You can change things in the source and run the Concordle.

You can save the changes as new versions of concordle.
How: select the text in the editor and paste it to your favorite
text editor (NOT microsoft word! ) - textedit.app or notepad or .....

Help text in Concordle

What can you do with Concordle?

It is easily understood when you just click on all the links.

I have chosen to use the links instead of buttons, they have the same usability, but the links are simpler. They just work.

In the first text field is as a standard my example text.
This can be cleaned and new text entered, probably you will just copy some text from a web page.

The omitted words - they are omitted from the analysis and the display,but they are kept in the memory.

The cloud of words can be clicked on - snippets of neighbouring text are shown in the concordance area.

You can also click on the various snippets - i.e. on the middle word there - and a new large snippet of about 60 words will appear. The omitted words are visible there.

All of the extra text areas can be closed by clicking on the appropriate link

How to save something from this page?

If you use SeaMonkey, you can copy and paste the text into the composer window, change the fonts to anything reasonably nice, and save the results.

The cloud can be shrinked or stretched. Try that

This page is the programme. Just save the page and you have the program too.

The whole source is about 770 lines, many of them empty. From these 770 about 500 lines are the program in Javascript, with many comments. You might be able to change many details in function and appearance, if you read and change the source.

To change the source, use a text editor. Read also the bottom of this page.

This is all "preliminary", but you never know, it might stay that way.

Plans: Add color variation, improve the table cloud function, make a double concordle.


This help text belongs to the first usable version, September 30th, 2008



And here is a screenshot with hints:

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Concordle - Not so pretty cousin of Wordle - Picture Gallery

Concordle - Not so pretty cousin of Wordle
Concordle lives at www.uib.no/people/nfylk/concordle/

This is a picture gallery of wordles and concordles
The pictures of wordles are made by
Wordle

SO I HAVE MANAGED TO UPSET THE TEMPLATE! Perhaps sometimes I will fix that!


made by Wordle

made by Wordle



made by Wordle



made by Wordle





Concordle - Not so pretty cousin of Wordle

Concordle lives at www.uib.no/people/nfylk/concordle/

Concordle is a cousin of Wordle, not so pretty, but it can do much more.

It is my entry to JavaScript. It took about 2 weeks of occasional thinking and two nearly full days of work.

This is the title-line of Concordle:
Concordle - Not so pretty cousin of Wordle


This is a Wordle of the text below ....And a (baby) Concordle looks like the this

Who is Concordle?
She is a not so pretty cousin of Wordle, who recently became very popular.
Wordle is a Java application (available as an applet)
who makes beautiful word clouds. Such a cloud is made according to a rule
that a more frequent word gets a bigger type (or font). Also colors can be used
for various coding, or just for beauty's sake.

Wordle makes beautiful clouds with beautiful fonts and many colors, and you
can play with it, possibly even produce a useful presentation or analysis.
Several people mentioned the potential of Wordle for research or teaching,
even at elementary schools. Wordle is beautiful, fascinating to play with,
Wordle makes beautiful clouds. But that is the end - beautiful pictures of a text.

Concordle has one point common with Wordle: it makes word clouds. But these are only text, and in a browser in general the choice of fonts is limited, so the clouds are not so very pretty. But it is much more clever:
All the words in the cloud ar clickble, i.e. links to concordancer function.
Wikipedia will tell you what a concordancer is, in case that you do not know from before.
So Concordle is a little concordancer which can be really used in research and
for some types of teaching. Thus it has a wastly broader capabilities than Wordle.

If your text contains 10 times the word "concordance", you might like to see why.
So you click on the big CONCORDANCE and all 10 the snippets of text arround the
ten occurrences of concordance in the text.

A real concordancer program can be used in linguistic studies, and also as a
tool for other types of analysis. A real free corcondancer is available, as
a Wikipedia page tells us. A real concordancer program makes the whole
concordance available at once, possibly on texts of tens of thousands of words.
Concordle works with texts of several thousands words without problems,
but as well as Wordle, Concordle is basically an educational toy,
not strong enough for heavy duty analysis of whole books or even sets of books.

Why have I written Concordle? The idea came naturally from Wordle. Besides, it is
a little tribute to my friend prof. Ralph Jewell of University of Bergen, who introduced me
to his use of concordance in philosophical analysis some 20 years ago. Further, I have
a long time talked about how useful JavaScript can be for general programming,
not only for AJAX and Gmail. So now I have written sort of large program.

Many people asked the author of Wordle for the source code.
Wordle is based on proprietary IBM libraries and thus not of open source.
In contrast, Concordle is based on my learning to program in JavaScript,
so the source is not only free, but documented and inviting for improvements.

If you are going to use Concordle, a little link and a mention of the
author would be greatly appreciated. Become friends with Concordle!

SO I HAVE MANAGED TO UPSET THE TEMPLATE! Perhaps sometimes I will fix that!


Pictures from these pages