Tendril + Valence


'Benjamin Fry Benjamin Fry

Tendril is a web crawler that creates dynamic typographic sculptures from the content of web sites. Branches are formed from the text of a web page, and each link on the page begins another branch for the linked page.

It is a typographic experiment that engages the user in creating a branching structure as they navigate a web site. Over time, the result is a large branching structure, built purely out of the text that is contained in a set of connected documents, and guided by the hand of the user as they choose the direction of links that are followed. It is part of a series of research in information visualization that seeks to bring form and structure to very large sets of raw data that are continually undergoing change.

acg.media.mit.edu/people/fry/tendril

Valence

Valence is a project that uses the properties of organic systems (things like growth, atrophy, adaptation, and metabolism) as methods for building representations that are based on the interaction of many simple rules in an attempt to achieve a more telling representation. These representations seek to make information expressive, where organisms consume and metabolize data to provide a qualitative feel for the information it represents.In Valence, every unique word in the book becomes a node. Branches are assigned to connect words that are found adjacent to one another in the text. A set of rules is applied to the system over time, as new words are being added to the space, and based on these organic properties. The resulting program reads the book in a linear fashion, dynamically placing each word into three-dimensional space.

acg.media.mit.edu/people/fry/valence