In preparation for Issue Nine (out next week!) here is a visualization of all the text in the issue as a network, thanks to Textexture. Have fun!
Category Archives: Visualizations
Really System @ Wheaton College Next Week
I’m thrilled to have been invited to visit Wheaton College to discuss reading, writing, and technology in a TechPaths Lecture next week. I’m also very excited to be visiting a creative writing class while I’m there– we’re going to do some Really System-style treatments of the texts they’re working on.
In honor of the visit, here’s a visualization of the text of Really System Issues 1-5 I created using the Lexos integrated Lexomics workflow tool developed at Wheaton by faculty and undergraduates. I’m hoping I get to talk to some of those involved while I’m there. This image totally reminds me of the cover to Love’s Forever Changes LP, which I love to be reminded of. Listen below. 
,.!?-…
Every period, comma, exclamation point, semi-colon, question mark, hyphen, and ellipsis in Really System issues 1-5, in order, very large.
I’ve been working on some part-of-speech tagging of the corpus lately, and this is just an easy, silly byproduct of that… I realized it was easy to extract this, and even in the default html font, I love how it looks. I had already stripped quotation marks, colons, and m dashes out because of the processing I was doing, so those aren’t here. Also, any apostrophes remain as parts of the words in which they are found with this tagger (the CLAWS tool), so those are absent as well. Looking forward to some POS stuff soon!
Every unique word in Really System issues 1-5 randomly color-coded by initial character, presented in random order.
Here is a page containing every unique word in the first 5 issues of Really System, color-coded by initial character, and presented in random order. The colors applied to each group of words sharing an initial character were applied randomly.
Issue Three Now On The Map
I’ve added all of the places in Issue Three to the Places in Really System Map. Check it out for some very specific additions:
Really System’s Expanding World
Thanks to places named in Magus Magnus’s Payload Dump and KJ Hannah Greenberg’s The Sanctity of Lists & Assistance with Quickly Becoming Unbearable, we have some more pins on our Places of Really System map after Issue Two‘s release. You’ll notice we’re no longer just dealing with US Locations.
Really System Issue One Composite
If you were wondering where the words in Issue One crowd around the page, here is an image of the text of each poem overlaid. If you pay close attention, you can read a few bits here and there, but you can also get a sense of the forms the poems in the issue tend to take.
The overall effect reminds me of the cover to Magus Magnus’s book The Re-Echoes, which I highly recommend.