Assignment

Choose a text or data source and count word frequencies following the examples above. Design your own creative output. This need not be visual (sonify word counts?) nor does it require code (knit your own word frequency scarf!) Some things to consider:

• Use a language other than English!
• What happens if you compare different texts according to word frequency?
• Can you look at frequency of how words appear next to each other?

Reflect on your process of word counting and consider the following questions:

• Did you discover anything new about the text by counting words?
• What is lost from word counting?
• Challenge the assumption that algorithms for analyzing text (such as word counting) are neutral.

For this assignment I chose to try and analyze my own text messages. What I discovered is collecting iMessage data is MUCH more difficult than I thought it would be! I managed to download a chat.db file of two days worth of text messages and then looked up how to extract the data from the file with javascript to transform it into a JSON file so I could load it into a sketch more easily. I did this by using a sqlite table and picking a few parameters that I’d save for the JSON file.

Dealing with the data took while. I had less time to spend on the visualizations as a result but plan to come back to it!

https://editor.p5js.org/wallismb/full/heEQa3qMR