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A Visualization

December 6, 2010

Here’s one of my visualizations for my project. It’s the most frequently occurring words in all three of the seventeenth century biographies of Caravaggio.All Three

11 Comments leave one →
  1. December 6, 2010 9:21 pm

    Nice color selections. I don’t know enough about Caravaggio to understand why Michelangelo is so prominent. Will you be educating us?

  2. sjenkinf permalink*
    December 6, 2010 9:36 pm

    It’s nothing fancy, just his first name. :P

  3. December 6, 2010 9:41 pm

    I am intrigued by a few of the frequent words, specifically “beach” and “Malta”. These are not words that come to mind when I think of Caravaggio and his works. Just curious.

    • sjenkinf permalink*
      December 7, 2010 2:09 pm

      After he killed that guy in Rome, he went to Malta to escape jail time. And it was on the beach where “without the aid of either God or man he died, as miserably as he had lived.” Haha.

  4. December 6, 2010 9:57 pm

    Oh. My bad. Please don’t tell Dr. Todd I didn’t know that.

  5. December 7, 2010 1:18 am

    Not to be a party pooper here, but did you try looking at the Wordles without the obvious words? That is, deleting, for example, “Caravaggio” and “Michelangelo” from the Wordle (right-click on the word you want to get rid of). That way other things will pop more as you remove some of the meaningless “noise.”

    I swear I am not trying to create more work for you!

    • sjenkinf permalink*
      December 7, 2010 2:07 pm

      I couldn’t figure out how to do that… can you help me?

      • December 7, 2010 3:08 pm

        Sure can! When? How?

      • December 7, 2010 3:17 pm

        Once you have the Wordle done, right there on the Wordle screen, right-click on the word “Caravaggio”…that will bring up the right-click menu with the option to “Remove Caravaggio.” Let me know how that works. I’ll be on FB if you need me.

  6. December 7, 2010 1:19 am

    I actually think it’s some of the smaller words that are most interesting: sword, flowers, deep, sweet. Might want to try using Wordle’s tool to get rid of some of the obvious big words (which is technically called adding them to the stop list; right click on a word to kill it) to highlight some of these midrange words that might have a lot of significance.

    • sjenkinf permalink*
      December 7, 2010 2:07 pm

      I tried to do that. But, I couldn’t figure it out! Those are the words I’m interested in as well, as they pertain to the more scandalous events of the artist’s life. My paper addresses how art historians over-use Caravaggio’s criminal history in their interpretation of his work, and I think that these seventeenth-century biographies are the reason why.

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