Word Affiliations in Religious Texts

Laura Devendorf / MAT 259 / Winter 2010

Concept

I wanted to see how words were used in relation to eachother in titles of books and I was focusing on religious books in particular. In doing this, I wanted to see which words were more commonly used together and it could potentially highlight some connection between those words. While my first project focused on words in relation to religion, this project focused instead on words relations with other words.

Source code: TitleFreq_3D_SphereApplet // Connection // DataParseCalculate // Integrator // Keyboard // Transaction // TransactionUtils // Word // Built with Processing

Controls

] - Iterate through single words in a forward direction.
[ - iterate through single works in a backward direction
0 - shows all words
Mouse - controls camera position and zoom.

Reading the Data

Each word has a line connecting it with any other word it appeared with in a title. For instance, if the title is "Green Eggs and Ham" then there would be a line connecting Green to Eggs, another connecting Green to Ham, and so on for every word in the title. The thickness of the line is determined by how often that word appeared with the other word. Since the data was calculated based on titles that were checked out, popular titles have thicker lines. Notice how "Jesus Camp" has the thickest connection of the bunch. When you are looking at a single word, the number next to the word indicates the amount of time this word appeared overall and in addition to showing the other words the active word is connected to, it shows also the words connecting the connected words. The positioning of the words in space is entirely random.

Images