The joy of parsing

The first time I watched and episode of The Joy of Painting I was mesmerized by the paintings, the phrases, and Bob Ross. A few months after, we were developing tools to explore and understand large archives at Fathom. While my colleagues were analyzing serious document sets, I decided to apply those techniques to the transcripts of each episode of The Joy of Painting. What started as a simple analysis of the frequency of iconic phrases such as Let's draw some happy little trees and Just beat the devil out of it quickly evolved into an interactive visualization to explore his paintings.