Talk:Lesson09

Creating Word Cloud Using Tableau

Besides Wordle and Many Eyes, it is also possible to create a basic word cloud using Tableau even though word cloud option is not available under the "Show me" tab. This can be done by changing the marks properties in the marks card. For example, if I want to know which occupation has the highest number of injuries, I will drag “Occupation” field to the “Text” card and specify the type of mark to show as “Text”.

Next, I will drag the same occupation column to the “Size” card. Right click on “Occupation” that is on the Size card and change to count instead of dimension.

I can also add some colours to the word cloud by dragging the Occupation column to Colour.

From the above example, I have realised that Tableau has so much more to offer and users are not restricted to the graph templates that are available under the “Show me” tab. By changing various properties in the Marks card, other visualisations such as word cloud and polygon maps can be created.

Sources:
http://kb.tableau.com/articles/howto/creating-a-word-cloud
http://kb.tableau.com/articles/knowledgebase/polygon-shaded-maps?

-Lim Hui Ting

Sunburst Diagram for Text Visualizations

In this lesson, I learnt that there are many ways to visualize text besides simply using tag clouds. While tag clouds help us easily visualize words based on their frequencies, they do not visualize the relationships these words may have with one another.

Besides the other visuals shared by Prof in class, I found another interesting visualization in the article: Information Visualization for Text Analysis, Marti Hearst, Search User Interfaces, Chapter 11 [1].

Similar to a sunburst diagram, visuals like the DocuBurst not only show us the weights (frequencies) of different words, they also display the hierarchical links between different words. Words linked to the text in the centre of the diagram appear as wedges in concentric circles. Size of the wedges reflect the frequency of which the word appears.

-Heng Yi Teng Mabel

Google Goggles for processing images with text

I would like to introduce a free android app developed by Google in 2010 to supplement the learnings in this class and share some comments I have to hopefully start a discussion on text. This app is called Google Goggles, and it is an image recognition mobile app.

While its primary function is to search based on pictures (eg take a photo of a famous landmark and return its information, take a photo of a barcode to return its information), it is pretty slick for any text images such as a book or magazine. It also adds contacts into your phone by scanning business cards.

In this image, the app is used to take a picture of a menu in a different language and it translates the menu for the user

In this image, the app has identified the book and returns the book review on amazon.

Application:
I believe that such an application is a step forward in text analytics and text visualization, where employees can scan hardcopy documents which may include resumes, hardcopy application forms into digital text for processing.

The app can be improved in a few areas as well, in particular of how to scan the text and reveal the 1 key message of that text. Or alternatively if it is a speech or an argument, what is the structure of that speech or story, where is the point, the elaboration, the examples and explanation, where is the climax of the story etc.

While the app is effective for text that has been printed, there are startups and technology being developed right now as to recognize handwritten and barley legible handwriting into text.

Hopefully such apps can help the user to have a starting point in analyzing the most unstructured data type (which is text) which doesn’t come in a convenient text file format, and using this app serves as a starting point.

References:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Goggles
• http://www.wordstream.com/google-goggles-app-for-mobile
• https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.unveil&hl=en
• http://lifehacker.com/5829946/the-best-image-to-text-app-for-android

-Albert Bingei

Graphic Furnitures in Tableau

I believe that many of us faced difficulty in changing the field label displays of Heatmaps. Tableau does not allow us to change/edit the display directly.

After much time consulting Google, I managed to find some other workarounds instead of directly editing the display of the label. Alternatives 1) https://community.tableau.com/message/320738 2) http://kb.tableau.com/articles/howto/renaming-dimension-column-row-headers

I hope it will help you in your Mini Assignment 3!

Graph + Text Visualization

Hi everyone, would like to share my two cents on a slight variation of the graph/text visualization. This an article of the Iraq war logs, visualized in the form of a graph/text visualization. Not sure if this falls cleanly under either type but it was interesting to see a story emerge just from one glance: https://blog.overviewdocs.com/2010/12/10/a-full-text-visualization-of-the-iraq-war-logs/

This was a hand-made visualization with the intent to derive some insight from the war logs. The sources of text came from various areas, such as recordings in court, emails, minutes and more. If you look at the bottom right, there is a summary and a legend of how to interpret the visualization. Unfortunately, there a bulk of it belongs to criminal events. I think that in a short span of time, one can unravel the key insights of a corpus quickly when displayed in this manner. If we put any emails or message logs in whatsapp, we can see if there are specific common topics that come about - possibly a theme of interest you and your friends share - thats why you are friends with them in the first place!

I do think it is missing some interactivity, where you could perhaps select a word and have the rest cluster around it just as the examples Professor Kam shown in class. In doing so, one can interact with the data and find common themes - codewords or slang you use perhaps? - Thomas Thio