threepress: open source software for publishers

Although this project is primarily aimed at tools for searching and reading textual content, software developers have increasing options to easily develop high-quality graphical applications. The program described here is written in the graphical environment Processing, but Adobe Flash or Microsoft’s Silverlight can be used for similar purposes.

I imagine applying techniques such as this to create algorithmic, generative book trailers, that exploit words in the text or use imagery derived from the web.

These two examples are the same program, threewords, running the text of Pride and Prejudice. Each time it displays a word, it records the frequency of that word. As terms appear more and more often, they zoom towards the viewer. Common words such as “the” are excluded. It would be possible to collapse all forms of a word to its common stem (the Xapian search engine used by threepress has stemming capability), but this version does not stem.

The first movie is of the initial four chapters, run at a readable speed:

The second is of the entire text, at 16X speed (2 minutes in length):

However, the application looks best when run locally. Processing exports standalone versions for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Source code is included in the application folders.

Look for more text-based movies in the coming months.

I just added support for AdaptiveBlue’s AB Meta format on all book pages.  I’m only supporting type, author and title because that’s all the metadata I have in the source XML. Hopefully I can find some content from other sources which is tagged in more detail.

I chose to use the Dublin Core namespace (rather than AdaptiveBlue’s) because it’s more familiar to me and more widely used in the industry.

Ironically it was much simpler to add AB Meta to my Django source code than it was to even explain how to do it in WordPress, as I did in a post on the Tools of Change blog.