Driving an IFS by a text suffers from the lack of a canonical conversion of the text to a string of four symbols.
For numerical sequences, the method of coarse-graining can be used.
For texts, the corresponding approach of dividing the letters into bins inherits the arbitrariness of alphabetical ordering, while binning words by parts of speech may reflect more grammatical constraints than writer's style.
Consequently, those experimenting with text-driven IFS must find a natural way of converting text into symbols.
In their project for the autumn, 2000, fractal geometry course, Alexander Clark and Thao Tran evaluated sound patterns of texts, with the goal of comparing the sonnets of Shakespeare and Wordsworth.
| First, Clark and Tran used the soundex algorithm to convert words into 5 digit codes. They drove an IFS with standard coarse-graining of the sequence of numbers thus produced. |
| Applying this method to Shakespeare and Wordsworth did not give striking patterns in the driven IFS. |
| Driving the IFS by the second half of the soundex coding seemed to produce better results. |
| For comparison, Clark and Tran tested the second half of the Soundex Algorithm on several prose pieces. |
Return to Text Driven IFS.