On the heels of yesterday's image search post here's another item connecting words and images, this one from researchers at MIT*. These guys have produced a "visualization of all the nouns in the English language arranged by semantic meaning**." I had thought the English language looked like a large, disturbing bunny, but aparently it looks like an enormous mosaic of tiny colored blobs.

From their intro: "large-scale groupings correspond to broad categories such as plants or people." Which lets us discover interesting trends, like that plants are green. That green blob at the bottom, floating around like Australia? Plants.

Then there's this: "each tile [is] the average of 140 images. The average reveals the dominant visual characteristics of each word. For some, the average turns out to be a recognizable image; for others the average is a colored blob." I clicked on dozens of tiles, and the average image was always a colored blob. This strikes me as analogous to taking all the synonyms for the word "person," grinding them through an averaging algorithm, and claiming the average word for "person" is "aoviksv". Which is to say, some things don't make much sense, averaged.

So this is pretty useless, even by my low standards of what constitutes utility. What it really appears to be is an eye-candy outcropping of a larger, more meaningful research effort--machine recognition of objects in images. And who knows, maybe some fancy algorithm can make better sense of "aoviksv" than our tiny little brains.

Let me insert my standard caveat to digs at academia: what the hell do I know. These guys represent MIT. Errata represents... New Jersey. If that.

* Via ReadWriteWeb, via Tech_Space.
** The source of their semantic meanings? WeirdNet, natch. Everybody love the WeirdNet.

Labels: images, MIT, visualization, wordnet

I'm a huge fan of online collaboration, and I particularly love (and try to build) tools that encourage people to create common good while having fun. It's the exact opposite of the tragedy of the commons: rather than squabbling over limited resources, and destroying them, people improve a shared resource, or create entirely new ones, while having a good time and benefiting themselves.

Many Eyes, from IBM's Visual Communications Lab, lets you visualize word relationships in literature. It's tremendous eye candy, and the visualizations are in essence collaborations between the site's developers (Fernanda and Martin, who I saw give a great talk at this year's Foo Camp*) and its users, who contribute data for the visualizations.

Self-sacrifice is a beautiful thing, but not the most effective motivator; for getting things done, there's nothing like aligning the interests of individuals and groups. It's idealism without the masochism, something Wordie aspires to. Many Eyes is fun, beautiful, and a great example of this mechanism in action.

* Pathetic name dropper: guilty.

Labels: many eyes, masochism, tragedy of the commons, visualization