Here’s a little program that:

1. splits up a text into individual words
2. searches for an animated gif for each word
3. displays the original text alongside the animated gifs

I’m using the giphy api to source the images, and the Communist Manifest as the text.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/78612357 w=640]

I broke the work up into two scripts: one that breaks apart the text, finds the images and then creates a csv file of the words associated with image urls. The second program reads the csv file and displays the images/text. I wanted to use animated gifs rather than static images. To get this working in processing used the gifAnimation library. The only problem with this library is that the images load one at a time, which blocks the sketch from running smoothly – so I implemented some threading to make the library load the gifs asynchronously.

My code is here on github: https://github.com/antiboredom/gif-to-text

UPDATE: html version here.