Creativity tracks

By | 2006-12-03

Some days ago I was thinking about a better way to value my vocabulary. Months ago I programmed a small word counter, but it was too simple and boring. I wanted to create something more interesting, more visual, like to show when and where I have written the most creative words.

How to measure creativity? Roughly speaking, you could say the most creative words are the least appearing words in a text. With this idea in mind, I started to program a “thermogram” image, with the timeline of the week as the X-axis and the position in the text as the Y-axis. Every word I’ve written was going to be a point in the image, and its colour intensity was the inverse of its appearances. The final result is here:
Creativity tracks

Honestly, I was waiting for a surprising visual result (like the kind of things that you can see in Information Aesthetics’ blog). I’ve tried different intensity curves, but it doesn’t change a lot. However, this result is somehow interesting. As you can see, I usually write on Monday, Tuesday and Wenesday at night, and at the midday on Sunday. The most creative point seems to be at the center of a post written on Wenesday night. Moreover, I shoud keep writing to fill more pixels 😉

If you’d like to put this in your blog (only wordpress blogs), here is the PHP file which generates the thermogram.