Lexigraphs I is the first visualization from the Data Portraits series. Micro-blog authors use mobile text messaging or web interfaces to post short answers to the question What are you doing?, creating a stream-of-consciousness account of their daily encounters, musings, plans and actions. Using salient words from an individual’s postings, we visualize the topical and temporal patterns to create a portrait of the author.

The words on the left side of the silhouette show the daily rhythm (one day is two seconds) while the right side shows a cumulative view.

GET YOUR TWITTER PORTRAIT!
(temporarily offline - in the process of changing data collection methods)

The application will generate the portrait for users with at least 100 posts. Users who write in languages in other than English might not be included or their wordlist might not be the most relevant/accurate because the selection algorithm is using an English language corpus.

TODO:
+ friendlier UI
+ interactive playback control
+ browse to other users
+ allow the user to select the number of words
+ support for languages other than English

clip 1: excerpt, random sample of 30 Twitter users, 1x speed:
lexigraphs1_30s.avi (mirror here)
file stats: 30 seconds, 100 Mb, 2560x1600, libx264

clip 2: excerpt, random Twitter user, 2x speed:
jakedfw.avi (mirror here)
file stats: 60 seconds, 20 Mb, 512x512, libx264

advisor:
Judith Donath, Sociable Media Group, MIT Media Lab.

additional software engineering:
Aaron Blankstein