Thursday 17 January 2008

English As You've Never Seen It Before

A "visual dictionary" showing what the English language looks like on the web has been created by boffins in the US.


Part of the map by Antonio Torralba, Rob Fergus and William T. Freeman . Although it may look like a piece of impressionist art, the mind-bogglingly detailed map actually shows all 53,463 nouns in English. Each word is represented by a coloured square, created from pictures generated using Google Images and other search engines.

The dictionary's inventors at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology collected nearly 80 million pictures in total - an average of 140 for each noun. They then ran a computer programme to find the "dominant visual characteristics" of each word. Each square corresponds to a word"For some, the average turns out to be a recognisable image; for others the average is a coloured blob,"
The above extracts are from an article by Hazel Tydesley on Sky News website.


I aimed for where I thought the letter G might be in th dictionary and came up with this - presumably "Fungi". If you fancy having a play with it yourself it can be found at http://people.csail.mit.edu/torralba/tinyimages/

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