Computer Science Final Project

It is amazing to think that the first semester is practically over.  Besides the few finals I still have to take, I have finished all my class and this afternoon I turned in my CS Final Project!  I spent so much time working on it over the last couple weeks, and I am very happy with the final result.

Basically, the project I choose to do was the generation of "Text Clouds."  These are when you count up the frequency of each word (after stemming them, of course) and the size of the letters in the final image reflect their frequency in the piece of writing.

It was a long process - the stemming took a substantial amount of time, since I wanted it to be fairly accurate, and then I spent a very long time with the special features on the webpage:

http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~jhoffswell/

This site is completely run by the programs and functions that I wrote myself!  An important note for when you decide to play with it:  the URL portion only works for pages at the Claremont Colleges.  Therefore, to get the full effect, I would recommend using the text entry portion.

Of all the various options on this page, the URL and submit buttons were the only parts required.  The various color and display options (as well as the text input) I choose to add just for the fun of it, and as customization of the original project.

It was a good deal of extra work, but it is so much fun to add all the customizations, and I am thrilled with the outcome.  Here are some basic pictures:

The top of the web page with the required URL input.  (Depth is extra),

Most of the additional features that I added to the web page.

A sample text cloud using the example URL