For the period of one week I used this keylogging tool to capture all of the language I used while on my laptop. This investigation was an attempt to insights regarding my thought and moods – it was inspired by our focus on language in the class Rest of You. Once the data had been captured I cleaned up the resulting text file to removed some of the most common words that I knew would skew the analysis (e.g. “the”, “that”, “this”, etc).

As luck would have it, during this same week we reviewed a treemap visualization library in Expression Frameworks.  This treemapping library for Processing was created by Martin Wattenberg and Ben Bederson’s and adapted by Ben Fry. It provides a simple (ok, maybe not so simple) framework for developing treemap visualizations from hierarchical data. In the case of my data, the hierarchy was created by the frequency of each word.

After some time struggling to understand how the library worked, I was able to generate some visualizations that looked interesting. I am still a long way from truly understanding the nuances available in this library but I have succeeded in tweaking it to add dynamic coloring and to limiting the words that are displayed. Here is a link to my code on github.

From this treemap, you can tell that last week I was working a lot on stuff related to my csa, data and sensors, heart rates, and time. Two interesting directions that I plan to explore in future key logging efforts include looking at the moods of my words, as was done by Patricia Adler and Patrick Hebron, and exploring the process of writing on a computer, as Josh Clayton did in a brilliant manner.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 29th, 2010 at 12:37 pm and is filed under expression frameworks, rest of you. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.