Title Relations Forming Constellations

Laura Devendorf / MAT 259 / Winter 2010

Concept

For my final project, I wanted to explore the ways book titles interacted with eachother and connect titles that share words. In this project, titles are dropped into the screen one at a time and then titles that have a shared word will attract to that new title. When playing with the forms, my favorite became this "constellation" from where shapes seemed to move and drift.

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Source code: TitleFreq_Titles Connection DataParseCalculate Integrator Keyboard Title Transaction TransactionUtils Word

Built with Processing

Controls

0 - Hide Titles.
1 - Hide Connecting Lines
w - toggle between showind the titles or the shared words in the titles

Reading the Data

Each box represents a title and the size of the box represents the number of "connections" that title has. A connection is formed when a title of one book appears in the title of another book. Each title can have multiple word connections and for this sample data, I used religious texts' titles. Each time a new title appears in the frame, the program checks to see if it shares a connection with any other titles in the frame. If it does, the other titles are attracted to it and a line is drawn. If the title that is attracted to the new title has connections of it's own, those titles are also attracted using a big fat recusive loop. I became a bit more interested in the sublime with this project so the aim is to sit back, relax and watch the forms move and random constellations form.