Textonics
0
3
.00
2015 - 2016
Client
Andrew Witt
Andrew Witt
James Yamada
James Yamada
Tobias Nolte
Tobias Nolte
Harvard GSD Geometry Lab
Harvard GSD Geometry Lab
Vitruvius
Vitruvius
Christopher Alexander
Christopher Alexander
Robert Venturi
Robert Venturi
Bernard Cache
Bernard Cache
Greg Lynn
Greg Lynn
Research
Research

Textonics maps and visualizes the deep structure not of the visual artifacts of architecture but instead the rhetorical ones: pivotal theoretical texts.

We tapped research in a certain domain of computational linguistics that is concerned with the classification of sentiment. Researchers survey hundreds or thousands of people rank tens of thousands of words relative to their positive or negative content, and how strong that emotional content is. We used these datasets to scan a series of architectural texts and unpack the tone of those texts as a structured image.

The images show the actual text at left and a "spectrum" diagram of tone at right. The rightmost blue region indicates a section of the text which is highly positive in tone, the leftmost red a highly negative tone. The specific words with greatest frequency read across the top. We did extensive cross-checking for synonyms and normalized other factors to make these spectra comparable. Ultimately there is an opportunity to apply methods of computational linguistics to the entire discourse of architecture, teasing out the structural ties that bind its rhetorical conversation.

Team
Andrew Witt
James Yamada
Tobias Nolte
Harvard GSD Geometry Lab
Vitruvius
Christopher Alexander
Robert Venturi
Bernard Cache
Greg Lynn
Research
Collaborators
Founder
Andrew Witt
Lead Software Architect
James Yamada
Founder
Tobias Nolte
Harvard GSD Geometry Lab
Vitruvius
Christopher Alexander
Robert Venturi
Bernard Cache
Greg Lynn
Research
EXHIBITIONS
Research Topics
Data Futures
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