Search the text in historical maps

The David Rumsey Map Collection has been home to tens of thousands of historical maps, and now you can search the collection by the text in the maps instead of just through metadata:

About 57,000 of the georeferenced maps from the collection have been processed with a machine learning tool called mapKurator to collect all the text on maps, i.e. every piece of text (printed or handwritten) that appears on a map, including place names, but also information like a map’s title or its scale, or the names of the people involved in producing the map. Through this process of automatic annotation, this approach turns the text on maps into structured data (text on maps data): the enormous amount of data that has been collected from these maps is now searchable.

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Fonts primer

The Washington Post provides an introduction to fonts with mini-quizzes and straightforward examples. You can also change the font of the article:

You make font choices every day. You pick type designs each time you use a word processor, read an e-book, send an email, prepare a presentation, craft a wedding invite and make an Instagram story.

It might seem like just a question of style, but research reveals fonts can dramatically shape what you communicate and how you read.

Everyone knows Comic Sans is always the best choice.

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Evolution of George Santos’ biography

George Santos, currently a U.S. representative, seems to lie about his background and qualifications. Someone will look into the details, show that they’re questionable, and the Santos story changes. For The Washington Post, Azi Paybarah, Luis Melgar and Tyler Remmel show this evolution through the lens of the Santos campaign’s about page.

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Election ad topics

Midterm election day is just about here in the U.S., so the political ads are running. Harry Stevens and Colby Itkowitz, for The Washington Post, show the spending breakdown by political party and topic. Bigger squares mean more spending, and more blue or more red mean more Democrat or Republican, respectively, share of the spending.

The chart reminds of the Shan Carter classic from 2012, which visualized word usage at the National Convention. Same split and sort, but with circles.

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Word cloud + Streamgraph = WordStream

I hear it all the time from chart purists. “I love the streamgraph!” and “Word clouds are the best!” and “I wish there was an easy way to combine a streamgraph and word cloud to see textual changes over time, because that would be ultimate!” Lucky for you, WordStream by Tommy Dang, Huyen N. Nguyen, and Vung Pham combines the best of both worlds.

They released the work a few years ago, but now it comes as an interactive tool on the web. Upload your comma-delimited file with time and text columns and you get a chart. Adjust sizes, parts of speech, and the metrics you want to represent for the ultimate words over time.

All it needs is an export button and research papers may never be the same.

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R graphics get modern text support, with ragg package

Thomas Lin Pedersen announced the ragg package, which makes font usage in R more straightforward:

I’m extremely pleased to present the culmination of several years of work spanning the systemfonts, textshaping, and ragg packages. These releases complete our efforts to create a high-quality, performant raster graphics device that works the same way on every operating system.

This blog post presents our improvements to ragg’s font rendering so that it now “just works” regardless of what you throw at it. This includes:

  1. Support for non-Latin scripts including Right-to-Left (RtL) scripts
  2. Support for OpenType features such as ligatures, glyph substitutions, etc.
  3. Support for color fonts
  4. Support for font fallback

All of the above comes in addition to the fact that ragg is able to use all of your installed fonts.

If you’ve tried to make publication-level graphics completely in R, you’re probably familiar with the challenge of using non-default fonts. The correct steps depend on your system and the words you want to add. It’s one of the reasons I bring R output into Adobe Illustrator, so now there’s one less extra step. Nice.

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Neural network creates images from text

OpenAI trained a neural network that they call DALL·E with a dataset of text and image pairs. So now the neural network can take text input and output random combinations of descriptors and objects, like a purse in the style of Rubik’s cube or a teapot imitating Pikachu.

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Text from press briefings categorized

The New York Times went through the words used during press briefings, pulling out five main categories and highlighting one in particular:

Viewed simply as a pattern of Mr. Trump’s speech, the self-aggrandizement is singular for an American leader. But his approach is even more extraordinary because he is taking credit and demanding affirmation while he asks people to look beyond themselves and bear considerable hardship to help slow the spread of the virus.

Hm.

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Analysis of online sermons

Pew Research Center analyzed online sermons in U.S. searches, taking a closer look at what people typically hear across religions:

For instance, the distinctive words (or sequences of words) that often appear in sermons delivered at historically black Protestant congregations include “powerful hand” and “hallelujah … come.” The latter phrase (which appears online in actual sentences such as “Hallelujah! Come on … let your praises loose!”) appeared in some form in the sermons of 22% of all historically black Protestant churches across the study period. And these congregations were eight times more likely than others to hear that phrase or a close variant. Although the word “hallelujah” is by no means unique to historically black Protestant services, this analysis indicates that it is a hallmark of black Protestant churches.

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Analysis of online sermons

Pew Research Center analyzed online sermons in U.S. searches, taking a closer look at what people typically hear across religions:

For instance, the distinctive words (or sequences of words) that often appear in sermons delivered at historically black Protestant congregations include “powerful hand” and “hallelujah … come.” The latter phrase (which appears online in actual sentences such as “Hallelujah! Come on … let your praises loose!”) appeared in some form in the sermons of 22% of all historically black Protestant churches across the study period. And these congregations were eight times more likely than others to hear that phrase or a close variant. Although the word “hallelujah” is by no means unique to historically black Protestant services, this analysis indicates that it is a hallmark of black Protestant churches.

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