Visualization of The Count of Monte Cristo

Plot.
If you are not aware of the story here comes a short summarize: A young and successful merchant sailor (Edmond Dantes) returns to Marseilles to marry his love, Mercedes. Shortly, a anonymous letter accuses Dantes of being a Bonapartist. He is wrongly send to jail, and the rest of the story is about Dantes revange and his love to Mercedes. Danglars, which can be seen in the wordl is the one who sets Dantes up. The other one is Villefort who also is visualized rather large in the wordle. 

• Title / Name: The Count of Monte Cristo
• Author / Creator: Alexandre Peré Dumas
• Publisher: N/A
• Date of Creation: 8 November 2008
• Date viewed: 18 October 2010
• Persistent Identifier: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1184/1184-h/1184-h.htm
• Language: English
• Format: .html
• Media type (if applicable): N/A
• Subject or Topic:
• Category or Categories:
• Tags (if none are available, write down the tags that you would add): Romance, Revange, 1800th story, Dantes, Chateau d'if, Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

First off, I'm gonna use Wordl to make a visualization of the text.

Settings.
Most frequent word used: The
Content word: One
Layout: Straighter edges and Half &Half
Color: Moss & A Little Variation
Font: Sexsmith
Words displayed: 200

Wordle gives me a visualized overlook of the text, at first look many of the main characters is shown, but if look closer you can also tell that the language is not only English. So, for a person who has not read the text, they can conclude a French touch of the story. The words that is visualized are locations, the characters names, and the story in short single words. So it summarize the text pretty good, but I think Wordls plattform, or the program is limited. I would like a feature were you can ask more questions from the text, and maybe put two and two together and create text analyzes from your created material. 

Text analysis with TAPoR.
TAPor is a text analisis program. This program is perfect if you want to create metadata about your text that your working with. The text can be of any kind. I would say that this program is suited for people who has large texts and for some reason wants to know specific information about the text. Say that you would want to know how many palindromes there are in the text, palindromes are words that are spelled the same weather they're read forwards or backwards. This would probably take for ages, and it's easy to make a mistake, and then you would have to start all over again.

As can be seen from my screen-shot, the possibilities are endless on how you can analyze a text with the TAPoR program. You can also find hidden patterns with this program.

Beneath are some metadata of the whole book, TAPoR creates this kind of data super fast, and it doesn't just look for simple metadata as page numbers or amount of titles etc. It can give you the average number of words used in a sentence, unique words, average word length etc. These facts might not be of any value to the common reader, but it is actually valuable information if you are looking for similarities or word concordance etc.    

 

Visualization with ManyEyes.

Here is my text presented in the IBM software ManyEyes, which is a text-analyze program with visualization features. You can choose to view your text in different visualization settings, the one beneath is the word tree. It's function is to show you how a word or a phrase is used in the text. For my text, Dantes is the main character and this is the findings with only his name.

  It doesn't just stop here, I can go further in my investigation. If I then click on another word, which in this case is 'was', it gives me all the phrases with 'Dantes was'. This tool is valuable, because like the other analyzing tools it gives you another perspective of the text.

And you can continue clicking on the words provided, until there is no phrase with the words you chooses. 

Summarize.
To analyze and figure out how we can do things better is in human nature, and these tools shown above are helpful for analyzing texts, but it has not yet spread the the broad public.
Companies uses analyzing tools daily to create better process and uses it to filtrate among information, just to be more effective and create understanding of what happens in different scenarios.

But, the tools shown, are not just for companies, they will eventually become "googelised" to the broad public and with that we can filtrate information even better then we can today with our search engines. As a user, it is not the word you put in that you are after, it is the meaning your after. And that is what I think these tools might give us in the future, but as the work today some of these tools are rather user friendly, but the creations it gives us might not be needed for the broad public.


As a student, these programs can come in handy if you need to get perspectives of your own text, or you are looking for clues on how to criticize some one others essay. ManyEyes different ways of presenting a text; scatterplot, bubble chart, pie chart, treemap etc are excellent ways of presenting rough data, that could be hard to explain in a short period of time or just to rough for common people in general. So I would say that these programs are best suited for teachers (in any level) students (in any level) and for people with the need for visualization tools at work, and that can be quit many!