Inside Out

Notes on seeking wisdom and crafting software

TextArc : Interesting way to view text

Ever wondered how would it be like to read a text in graphical fashion ??

[TextArc](http://www.textarc.org) is nice tool which lets you view text as interesting patterns, word associations and frequencies of each word in a text. It will look as a cobweb of words n words at the first look :P

Make sure you go through the **Help** in the Applet to check out how this works. Here is a small screenshot taken while the applet reads Hamlet by Shakespeare.

![](http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/2403/textarc5of.jpg)

Some quick notes :

- The whole text is organised in an arc fashion..with the words which appear more often being highlighted.
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  • The applet places text at a position that is calculated by taking average. In other words the word appears close to the portion where it is used frequently. Click on any word and you can see the places it is used in the text with straight lines in various directions ;)

  • As the applet reads through the text (click on the Read option to see how this works) there is a line which moves from word to word as they are being read !! The patterns made in this process are worth a look.

  • Even you can use the thesaurus provided in the applet. This downloads some extra stuff so it may take some time.

Some more screenshots with proper explanations are available hereтЖЧ

technorati tags: textтЖЧ, graphical viewтЖЧ