Text Message Visualization

A side project I have worked on is developing visualizations for text message conversations using text mining tools. The result is a Python tool for visualizing Facebook messenger conversations, which can be exported from Facebook as HTML files. The script automatically generates a visualization of the conversation by

1. Parsing the HTML file to extract all the message, user, and, timestamp information

2. Using the information from (1) to create word clouds, emoji clouds, radar charts, line graphs, and numeric summary statistics.

The first figure above results from applying this automatic tool to a conversation between a graduate school classmate, and the second from applying it to a group message between friends. The Python code along with implementation details for this tool can be found on my Github page.

These types of visualizations can be additionally customized. The final figure implements a custom visualization of both the SMS and Facebook messenger conversations with my girlfriend. Additional features included shape masks for the word clouds, individual-specific word and emoji clouds, custom colors matching our alma maters, monochrome cartoon images of our portraits, and a different font.