The many shades of language
Rainy Day reader Miriam Crieghton wants to know if our weekly Word for the wise © will be presented in some "permanent form" when the end of the alphabet has been reached. Haven't thought about that, to be honest, but the idea has appeal. Odder things have been published. Twenty years ago, when the very successful Bill Bryson was then a young copy editor at the London Times, he encountered so much confusion about language within the paper that he wrote to Penguin Books suggesting that there was a market need for a concise guide to problematic aspects of English usage. The result was Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words. So, there are precedents.
But the future of Bryson's kind of guide or even dictionaries may not be a print product but a web application. Take, for example, Color Code, a Java applet (program) written to run in a web browser. Color Code is a map of 33,000 English nouns, where each small rectangle corresponds to a word. The words are clustered so that similar ones are near each other and when you move your mouse over the rectangles you see the relationships. In other words, Color Code is a visualization of language.
Martin Wattenberg, the IBM researcher who created Color Code, selected the words and their relationships from the WordNet database at Princeton, and processed them with the help of the Java WordNet Library. By the way, Color Code is not the only entrant in this new field. Thinkmap's Visual Thesaurus shows a mesmerizing view of word relationships; Gradus offers a 3D historical view of English, and Aesthetiscope uses colour weighting to enhance poetry. Language, a dynamic, living, breathing construct is just beginning to express itself interactively online.
