How can we visualize the chorus of voices who share their hopes & dreams digitally?

The idea started while I was checking out the album covers for Explosions in the Sky. I really dug this one in particular:

I realized that using public data from Tabulas journals, I could try to do something similar.

The end result, after a few hours of hacking, as a screenshot:

You can see the demo to see it live; refresh and every time you'll get a different set of phrases. Each set of phrases links to the original entry.

If you like the way a particular one looks, there's a # at the end of each block, which provides a permalink for that page. The screenshot above has a permalink here.

How I did it:

It was simpler than I thought it'd be - given that Tabulas extracts keywords from entries so it can generate a "related entries" list, I simply found all phrases which had more than 50 entries which were associated with that phrase. Each page in the demo above contains the same phrase.

Then I extracted those entries, did a simple regular expression to parse out the sentence (or sentence fragments) which I then output.

So simple, but I think the effect is cool. If I were to expand on it in the future, I'd do 3 things:

1. Automatically poll the server every 30 seconds for a new list, then phase it in with some animation effects
2. Pass it through the gd graphics library in PHP so I could actually output an image ... then I could use different fonts to match the album image more precisely
3. Have this song play in the background :)

It was fun doing something pointless... haven't really had a chance to do something like this in a while.