takos-looking outwards 7

I thought that the word tree by Martin Wattenberg & Fernanda Viégas  was really interesting. I’ve always been intrigued by linguistics and the ways that people use language, so I was naturally drawn to it. The particular example image that I included is the data visualization of a set of sentences in which the speaker/writer, a man, reveal in their personal ads that they are married. It’s interesting to see the different ways that different people can go about saying essentially the same thing, and this data (I wish it was easier to read as the text gets smaller, but I couldn’t find anything of a higher resolution) reveals a lot about the people who wrote these adds. For example, you can clearly see that about a third of them were upfront about their marriages, but the others are not. The image is presented as sentences that do reveal that men are married, but only one occurrence of the word “married” is very apparent, which means that the other mentions are hidden deeper within the sentences and kind of hidden. I also thought this chart was interesting in that it ties in extremely well with Markov chains that are construction sentences. If you inputted the same data in a Markov chain and made a sentence from it, you would be able to track the new sentence through this chart, because it shows the likelihood of the groups of words that come after other words.