When you read a book it can feel as if you’re encountering a series of hidden networks–characters who talk to each other, ideas that relate to each other. Our new visualization, the Phrase Net, is designed to bring some of these networks to light.

The image below shows a phrase net for Jane Austen’s novel, Pride and Prejudice. To create this network, we start by choosing a connecting word: “and” The visualization then searches the entire novel for “linking phrases” of the form “word1 and word2″. Each of these phrases defines a connection between two words. The resulting graph shows clusters of related concepts and people.

The size of each word shows how many times it occurred in a linking phrase. The arrows show the order of the occurrences. Darker blue words occurred typically as the first word in the linking phrase, while light blue words occurred in the second position.
Other connectors give different views. The word “at” provides a network of places in the the book.

In addition to a standard menu of phrases, we let you type in your own phrase patterns. Use an asterisk to stand for a word–any pattern with exactly two asterisks will give rise to phrase network. (Advanced users can type in full “regular expressions” as well.). You can read more about the Phrase Net on its description page here.

Since the Many Eyes phrase net is based on simple pattern matching, it certainly doesn’t tell you everything about the underlying network of concepts in a piece of text. But we’ve found it to be a surprisingly interesting tool for viewing books, speeches, and other unstructured documents. We’re curious to hear your comments on this visualization technique–and to see what networks you come up with!