Regex and the Visual Context of Content

In my attempts at dinking around with regular expressions this week, I decided to use the Harry Potter books as my source text. Without any potential spoiler given away, the person “R. A. B.” becomes an important mysterious character at the end of book six. In attempts to see if Rowling had already mentioned this character, I did an analysis of each book looking for three words side by side, first starting with R, then A, then B. These were my results and my code.

I also thought it would be fun to grab all the dialog from a book, so I did that with the fourth book in the series. Code and Results.

In the reading for this week, I was reminded of my days in graphic design school and all the emphasis and important typography plays into the interpretation and desire of audiences to read the text. Its funny actually, my mind is constantly jumping back and forth over these issues.

So often I see text scandalized for the sake of a “wow” factor. It was my job for many years, and I begin to crave nothing more than the raw data… the raw strings. Give me the meat. If I like the taste by itself, then perhaps its worth my attention in the oversaturated media world we are in. I began designing websites with little to no visual wow factor, and information and content design became my primary ways of “designing” a set of information. Put the information in the right place, make it easy for people to get to it. Its one step away from the “Information wants to be Free” idea. Its the notion that I will put it in a zoo to make it appear its free… in its contained space.

But there’s no doubt that certain pieces of text need visual representation as a priority of their life in the public view. Darick Chamberlin’s Cigarette Boy, the last example in our reading, is a perfect example. The information itself needs an appropriate wrapper, and was successfully delivered in this piece.

You know, just like everything, its a balance. Its a lot like cooking steak. You can spend all day soaking a steak in amazing spices, and sprinkle and beat in others while its on the grill, but its still going to taste sub-par if its a bad piece of steak to begin with. You can season grissle to perfection, it just smacks the person eating it in the face, one way or another.

Start with a nice, tender, lean piece of steak (content), and the cooking will take care of itself.

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Add comment January 29th, 2006

Rethinking Algorithms

Throughout the readings this week in Programming A-Z, I’m reminded of some of my winter break reading. Specifically, the distinction between an alrorithm and a heuristic. In my attempt to understand some of Mac Low’s work, I began to see the distinction between input and output.

Input is an algorithm. People may optimize it, but it is a clear and consice problem which an algorithm can get right every time. Read the file size, allocate space, copy that information into that space, and package that space in a way that is easily useable.

Output on the other hand, I find to be more heuristical in nature. What we as programmers, and/or the computers we use decide to do with the text is not steadfast and the same every time. What makes programming valuable is the ability to do tasks that are outside of time and space for a normal human being, and furthermore, the ability to do something we as humans would not be able to do without it. Approaching these challenges as a heuristic allows us the freedom to know we aren’t creating a perfect system, but rather a nuanced system that will render interesting and thought provoking results.

As for this week’s exploration of text, I chose to make a simple aggregator that collects all of the words from an input source of a certain size, and outputs that for interpretation. The results are a bit quirky, but bring up interesting issues. The bigger the word you search for, the more often that word is of higher vocabulary, bringing class systems to mind as well as other nuances. The smaller the text, the more that remains, therefore arguably, the more understandable the text is.

Source is here.
Example with three letter words aggregated here.

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Add comment January 24th, 2006