The title screen for E.V.G. To begin using the program the user must stand with both hands in the "open" position. This sets the user as the primary tracking target for the kinect allowing it to ignore other people who may be in the space. Once being tracked the user is free to interact with the program using hand gestures and manipulations. 

Note: The examples below are recorded using a mouse to control the program.

Once the user proceeds from the title screen they are prompted to choose a piece of text from which to extract the data. The user may hover over each option to see the text and may choose a given text by "grasping" the icon. In this case the chosen text is chapter 1 from "Notes from the Underground" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Once a text has been chosen by the user they may progress on to the extraction stage. In this stage the user witnesses the process by which data is extracted from their chosen text. First, the text is rendered so that the user may read it if they choose to. The words composing the text are then colour coded based on their parts of speech (noun, verb, pronoun, etc). The colours used are generated by the program based of the characteristics of the text. Based on the parts of speech tags, lexically irrelevant words are removed from the text leaving behind only lexically relevant parts of the text. A lexically relevant word is a word who meaning is important in conveying the overall meaning of the text. Generally nouns, verbs and adjectives are considered lexically relevant. Once only the  lexically relevant words remain they are sorted based on their part of speech tag and numerical data extracted from the text is displayed to the user.

In the next stage the data extracted is visualised in an interactive, animated infographic. The occurrence of every lexical word in the test is represented along a radial distribution. Each concentric ring represents a different part of speech group (noun, ver, pronoun, etc) and each stroke within that ring represents an instance of that particular part of speech. 

The occurrence rate of lexical words in the text is visualised using a bubble map that surrounds the radial distribution. Each bubble corresponds to a word that appears in the text. The size of each bubble corresponds the the number of times that word occurs within the text.

The final stage in the program is the generation of a nodal system. The generation of the system is seeded using the data extracted from the text. Attributes such as sentence length and syllabic complexity among others influence the colour, physics and and behaviour of the system resulting in a unique generation for each unique piece of text. 

The central node corresponds to the main body of the text. The child nodes correspond to the paragraphs that compose the main body and the grandchild nodes correspond to the sentences that compose each paragraph. This nested structure, when visualised, results in the nodal system. 

The example below is seeded using data extracted from chapter 1 of "Notes from the Underground" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Below are a few more examples of systems seeded using data from other texts.

Below is a system seeded with data extracted from "On Finding Meaning" a letter written by Hunter S. Thompson.

Below is a system seeded with data extracted from "Alice's Adventures in" by Lewis Carroll.

Below is a system seeded with data extracted from "Thus Spake Zarathustra" by Friedrich Nietzsche.

There were many steps along the development process of EVG. Some of those steps produced interesting results that didn't appear in the final program. Below are some of those interesting results. 

The output below is a radial distribution of parts of speech from chapter one of "Notes from the Underground".

Below are various stages of development for the nodal system. The first two explore a microbial, cellular aesthetic while the last one explores the use of colour in the system.