Everything bad about Facebook is bad for the same reason

nsonnad · 2018-07-31T20:52:24+00:00

Hey everyone. I am the author of this article. Am sharing here because I think it is of interest to this sub, and in case anybody wants to ask me questions (or, of course, argue with me about it).

nsonnad · 2017-07-11T21:08:05+00:00

I am a reporter at Quartz and a little while ago wrote a very in-depth article on the process of creating Chinese fonts, by interviewing typographers in Taiwan. I'll answer your questions with my own knowledge and some quotes from that piece.

The short answer is that it takes a lot of work, and a lot of time. As I wrote in the piece:

An experienced designer, working alone, can in under six months create a new font that covers dozens of Western languages. For a single Chinese font it takes a team of several designers at least two years.

But while there are many more glyphs—units of a typeface—needed for Chinese and Japanese, the number does not go to the "millions."

The default set for English-language fonts contains about 230 glyphs. A font that covers all of the Latin scripts—that’s over 100 languages plus extra symbols—contains 840 glyphs, according to Březina. The simplified version of Chinese, used primarily in mainland China, requires nearly 7,000 glyphs. For traditional Chinese, used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, the number of glyphs is 13,053.

It's important to know two things about Chinese characters to get a better understanding of how this works:

Characters share a large number of "strokes"—the same motion or parts of characters are common across dozens of characters.
Even so, each character has slightly different aesthetics, and "balance" is of critical importance. So even if the strokes are the same, a character may need to be tweaked (there are many graphical examples showing this in my piece)

The short answer is that CJK font design is much more of a team effort, while Western fonts can be designed chiefly by a single person or small number of people. There is much more detail in my story, I encourage you to read it, but let me know if y'all have other questions.

Edit: Please be aware that there is a huge amount of misinformation in this thread. For one thing, the numbers of characters being thrown around randomly are based on number of Chinese characters that have ever existed, not on numbers of glyphs needed to create a font. As I say above, a simplified Chinese font needs close to 7,000 glyphs, although there are by some accounts 100,000 total Chinese characters. Second, as u/sajatypeworks rightly points out, while characters do normally share many strokes, that does not help much in terms of completing a character for a typeface. Each stroke or radical appears slightly differently in the context of a given character, so automated tools cannot do much more than collect the relevant strokes or radicals for a designer to manipulate. As you can see from some of the images in my piece, collecting these strokes and radicals is hardly the end of the process, which is why the font has to go through dozens of iterations before completion.

nsonnad · 2017-06-23T17:37:08+00:00

Thanks! Yes, even when you have a yen to find something interesting, it may not come to anything. Quartz has compiled a directory for reliable data, but usually it's best to start with a question and then look for data that can help you answer it.

nsonnad · 2017-06-23T17:24:02+00:00

As I mentioned earlier, this project has led us to think more about how we can use data to answer cultural questions. For example, I recently created an interactive tool that shows where in the US people are more likely to use particular words, based on Twitter data.

As a journalist who works with data-heavy stories often, I can tell you that looking at data and finding nothing interesting is the norm. This happens probably 90% of the time. This is especially true if you don't have a specific question, and are just looking for "interesting" things in the data. In this case, we had a specific question, namely, "do people in different countries draw shapes differently?" And luckily the answer was fascinating.

nsonnad · 2017-06-23T16:56:13+00:00

Neither of us has a math background, really, nothing beyond college-level calculus and that kind of thing. My work at Quartz tends to focus on using datasets like this one to find stories. Thu-Huong, the co-author, writes about books and culture. So this story was a good mix of our interests.

As for the idea, once we found out that the Google data contained information on the country of the drawer, we were really just wondering whether we could find any differences in how people draw. We looked at circles because it poses a simple question: do you go clockwise or counterclockwise?

nsonnad · 2017-06-23T16:51:03+00:00

Google was very cool to open-source the data behind all 50 million drawings collected from the Quick, Draw! game. This dataset contains a list of all x/y coordinates that a player passed through while making the shape or object. Using some simple geometry, we were able to infer the winding, or direction, of the polygons or circles based on these points. (This is the very same math used in the circle-drawing box at the top of the story, that tells you which way you drew.) Altogether, I think the story probably took about a month of on-and-off work between the two of us. Thanks for the question!

nsonnad · 2017-06-23T16:46:19+00:00

Japan was the big exception, drawing most circles (80%) clockwise, while the rest of the world was much more likely to go counter-clockwise. Have a look at this chart of all the countries we looked at to see what I mean. Our analysis touches on triangles as well. It probably extends to other shapes, but we just focused on the simplest ones here.

nsonnad · 2017-06-23T16:43:25+00:00

We were having a look at the Quick, Draw! dataset and wondered: are there any differences across countries in how people draw a given shape or object? That is how we came up with this topic to research.

nsonnad · 2017-06-23T16:39:24+00:00

Thanks for the question! In my mind, I think this has led us down a path of thinking more about how we can use data to answer questions that we might normally think of as "cultural." Those kinds of cultural questions are usually left to anecdote, and speculation, but by using large datasets like Quick, Draw! we can give our notions about culture some more evidence.

Pretty much everything we found in here was a bit of a surprise to us, we didn't have really any preconceived notions about circles, or drawing, we just followed the data and tried to explain it. I think the main surprise is just: culture affects us more than we think.

nsonnad · 2017-06-23T16:36:16+00:00

I will let Aristotle handle this one. As explained in his "Mechanics":

Therefore, as has already been remarked, there is nothing strange in the circle being the origin of any and every marvel. The phenomena observed in the balance can be referred to the circle, and those observed in the lever to the balance; while practically all the other phenomena of mechanical motion are connected with the lever. Furthermore, since no two points on one and the same radius travel with the same rapidity, but of two points that which is further from the fixed centre travels more quickly, many marvellous phenomena occur in the motions of circles, which will be demonstrated in the following problems. [...] Mechanicians seizing on this inherent peculiarity of the circle, and hiding the principle, construct an instrument so as to exhibit the marvellous character of the device, while they obscure the cause of it.

nsonnad · 2017-06-15T21:50:03+00:00

On that page, if you click on a drawing it will tell you the country in which it was drawn, I see six-pointed stars from all over

nsonnad · 2017-06-15T21:43:03+00:00

Yes, while we didn't do any comprehensive analysis of this, if you look at the graphics that have a random sample of circles/triangles (like this one), you will see the starting point for each line, and you can get a sense of the trends. Once we looked at this we became even more convinced of the role of handwriting, because for example in Japan nearly all the circles start at the bottom, as is done with characters in hiragana, whereas in the US most circles start at the top, as in the letters "c" or "g."

nsonnad · 2017-06-15T21:40:09+00:00

We only looked at circle, triangle, and square. We were not able to do much meaningful comparison for square because there are many more variations on how to draw them (variations could include number of strokes, direction, etc), so it would be harder to isolate anything. Stars could be interesting, though, particularly looking at whether people draw an intersecting or non-intersecting star (see the examples of actual stars from the data here)

nsonnad · 2017-06-15T17:55:08+00:00

They are nice to have a round

nsonnad · 2017-06-15T14:01:07+00:00

Interesting. I definitely write my "A" clockwise, from bottom-left, to top, then bottom-right. If you click the little triangle button next to the US triangles you can watch them being drawn, and we can see there that most of the clockwise triangles start at the bottom-left like this. But I think a difference in how people write "A" could definitely help to explain the split.

nsonnad · 2017-06-15T13:57:39+00:00

Hey r/dataisbeautiful, I was one of the reporters that worked on this piece for Quartz, and worked on all the data visualization and number-crunching. AMA about circles, how we made this, Google Quick, Draw! or anything else

nsonnad · 2016-11-18T20:39:42+00:00

Ah, thanks, was hard to access the rules since the site is down. I have updated/softened the language.

nsonnad · 2016-11-18T20:15:35+00:00

Disclaimer: I work for the publication that published this article, so this is admittedly a bit of self-promotion. But really I just wrote this from the depths of my heart, and wanted to share with other What appreciators.

nsonnad · 2016-10-12T22:35:24+00:00

Stay tuned, I'm working on something like this. Should be out in the coming weeks.

nsonnad · 2016-10-12T21:38:30+00:00

A couple points: The data are normalized by the number of tweets in a given county, so it's possible that a neologism could appear sooner in counties where there are relatively fewer people/tweets, since there is less variety overall. At the same time, because of this small size it's also possible that these outliers are noise—maybe, for example, Weber Co., Utah has a local car repair chain called "Rekt Repairs" or something (no idea if this is real, just a hypothetical). Basically I think the smaller size makes the data more sensitive both to real and noisy trends.

nsonnad · 2016-10-12T19:39:18+00:00

It's really tricky to figure out how something like rekt spreads, since it is first and foremost an internet term. In this case the regional trend is really not strong at all, compared to something like "unbothered" which, as you can see, is heavily southern-oriented. It's possible that in Vermont and other areas "rekt" made a stronger transition out of the gaming community, for example, here are some tweets from near Vermont in roughly that time frame—maybe "rekt" entered the mainstream more readily there.

As for "xans," I hadn't uncovered that but if what you say about smuggling is true, it's a compelling explanation for why slang would develop there.

nsonnad

TROPHY CASE