The Regressive Imagery Dictionary
The Regressive Imagery Dictionary is totally amazing. It’s a set of 3,000 or so words separated into 3 main categories: Primary, Emotional, and Secondary. It suffers from bad labeling.
From what I can tell, the Primary category is for very physical, basic, almost animalistic concepts, sensations, instincts, and passions. The Emotional category is for the emotions of course, but more like the moods that we go through throughout the day rather than the initial reactions to everything. And Secondary is all about rationality, thought, cognition, abstract thinking, etc.
It takes a text file of any sort and parses out the words to figure out which categories (and the magic comes from the subcategories, like Icarian Imagery), the text is heaviest in.
You end up with percentages of the top level Primary, Emotional, and Secondary categories, but you also get a lot of information about how the text scored in all of the subcategories.
A few of my favorite subcategories include:
- Primary -> Need -> Sex
- Primary -> Rare Knowledge -> Timelessness
- Primary -> Rare Knowledge -> Icarian Imagery
- Secondary -> Moral Imperative
- Emotion -> Anxiety
- Emotion -> Glory
Someone was even helpful enough to port the script to Ruby. I’ve got a plan to put this into use on 750words.com in the next couple days. It’s gonna be pretty awesome, I think.