Slashdot Mirror
Words That Speak a Thousand Pictures
venolius writes: "The New York Times (free registration required) has an article
on TextArc (created by W.Bradford
Paley), a site that "aids in the
discovery of patterns and and concepts in arbitrary text" (from the detailed
overview at TextArc). The site serves an applet that performs the task
(texts on which analysis is available include Alice
in Wonderland, Hamlet, and thousands
of others -made available by Project
Gutenberg-). The NYTimes article reports that Paley found that
"Dracula", which relies on a strong storyline had a few keywords
clustered hotly at the center, and that the metaphoric "Frankenstein"
generated a circle of 50 words of modest intensity that faded towards the edges.
"Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" with evenly distributed key
words produces tight and round lines and "Alice in Wonderland"
produces loopier lines. Check it out! (the applet was tested on better
hardware, but I did well enough with 98/IE6/550MHz/64MB)"
Don't ever do that to my browser again...
is this really new? I think maybe some of my teachers having been using this thing to grade papers.
that slashdot posting a link would indicate that it doesnt do horrible things(tm) to your system / browsing experience....
guess not...
I wanted to generate one on this comment and see how it handled recursion...
there was never anything as sophisticated as that used for grading papers...
I heard a rumour that grades were assigned by how close the teacher got to the target while holding the paper in her hand in a game of "pin the tail on the donkey"
alt.sex.stories.* And see what the results are!! :) What "patterns" might develop? The mind reels!!
"All your base are belong to us"
"Somebody set up us the bomb"
Is there any pattern there?
Fabio - Sumare/Sao Paulo/Brazil/South America/Earth/Solar System/Milky Way/Universe
http://www.morroida.com.br
...the one we already have, that is:
map connections between two words, concepts, or famous names
see a word's rhymes, synonyms, definitions
and I leave the rest to you.
As usual, one can change the www.nytimes to
archive.nytimes to acces the article without registration.
Hahaha! Looks pretty cool in MSIE 6.0 under Windows2000. Maybe you should upgrade to a better operating system and browser? Mine doesn't lock up like yours does on such a simple web site. Do you want thewayout?
and and it even filters out extraneous conjunctions!
Brought to you by the Associated Federation of Organizations.
Once again Project Gutenberg shows its beautiful face. If you haven't heard about it before, then read a Wired feature here. Michael Hart started the project years ago and he wants to digitize anything which is out of copyright. The uses are infinite (think of the blind who can fead texts to tactile printers, for example), which this story also shows.
Anyway, Hart is a big supporter of sensible copyrights (read the feature) and if you can spare the time, help him by digitizing your favourite book.
Hurra for Knark!
Just remebered this:
/. interview with Michael Hart
Nupedia and Project Gutenberg Directors Answer - a
Hurra for Knark!
Although I only viewed one book, it came up with some interesting results. I'd be curious to know how similar an authors books are to one another... can this distinguish an author's style, or merely individual works.
I also imagine that a college professor might be interested to run this against term papers!
The Jargon File is out there and, oddly enough it too looks pretty similar to the others described. I don't know that is speaking highly of the JF or poorly abou the rest of the work out there.
What is music when you despise all sound?
Works great on my SGI... (250 MHz R10K Octane, 256 MB, Netscape 4.79, Java 1.3.1, IRIX64 6.5.15m).
Got the latest versions from here:
http://www.sgi.com/products/evaluation/
Zipping thru some CS Lewis right now. Very, very cool!
[snazzy sig here]
throws my library of books about web-usability at those biggots... /boot/vmliunz > /dev/audio"
nice try. but staring at white noise on my TV is more fun.
or listening to "cat
This is very nice looking.
Would make a really cool screen saver if it where in c and not java. Any volentears?
But now I must put on my "think like corp. hat"
Some publisher goes out and maps all the great books and compairs them with current best sellers. Coralate the patterns and then decide that Fromat X creates the best sellers that people buy. Now they refuse to print any book that does not fit their demo graphic of what they concider to be the next best seller.
Its only a matter of time befor these kinds of things are used like a DNA test to see weather a book has good "genes" or bad "genes".
I know it sounds like a conspearicy but I have seen corp.s do stranger things in attempting to repeat past successes. Just look at the movies. We are about to release Star Wars -2 in the name of working on a tried and true formula that started with the release of Jaws II. Did anyone else catch the Special on PBS (frountline i think) that talked about how Jaws was the birth of the end of original movies as we knew it?
Ascii artist &
There was a dual explosive center around the words "FreeBSD" and "Linux", a tangled network emanating from the phrase "Alan Thicke" and complex sparkling array of connections between the words "Gates", "Microsoft", "monopoly", and "blue screen". There was also a massive weird lumping around the word "Stallman" but it crashed my browser.
This is exceedingly facinating. I've worked with word associations for computer authoring, mostly Markov chains of various lengths and phrase-structure stuff. While this takes works for human authors and works out from that, there are some very interesting concepts in here which may be useful in the other direction.
And on top, a wonderful way of displaying it, to catch the eye so the brain has time to engage. 8)
=Blue(23)
LITTLE GIRL: But which cookie will you eat FIRST? C. MONSTER: Me think you have misconception of cookie-eating process.
This is certainly a very interesting tool for summarization and analysis. Viewing it thru an NLP perspective, it converts a text into a purely visual representation. It would be interesting to examine writing from different communication channel dominant authors and check for the pattern differences. It would also be helpful for checking consistency of translations.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
TextArc would certainly be a useful tool for analysis of undeciphered languages and texts. Ventris certainly could have used this for Linear B. The only big limitations would be requiring a suitable sized text and having a consistent meaning to that text. As in, the Rosetta stone probably was not a long enough text to analyse this way.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Does anyone besides me think that this kind of technique could provide stronger protection in cases of source code piracy such as GPL violations, theft of codebase, etc.,? By generating visual patterns based on the occurrence of keywords (or even compiled bytecodes) a signature of a codebase could be generated that is still recognizable even after comments have been stripped out or subtle changes introduced. This could be immensely valuable in GPL infringement cases.
But a word of warning to anyone else running Win98 on a P133 with 64MB RAM. This thing nuts your machine. I can't get it off my desktop. I'm gonna have to reboot again.. arg.
My life is one big siesta in which I'm dreaming I wished my life was one big siesta.
I have to say it: I see no value in this. The mathematical algorithms do more to shape the images than the words themselves. My opinion is that this is rather unartistic, uninspiring, and doesn't reveal anything about language at all.
Here's a link to the Random New York Times Registration Generator. I found this on a previous slashdot comment but do not recall who posted it. Enjoy!!!
One of the coolest, and most useless things I've ever seen.
I like it!
I'm tired of listening to people on /. complain about their browsers (et. al.) not working properly. That's what you're signing up for when you installed Linux as your desktop OS in the first place! You've got to do a little more work than everyone else does to get the same results.
I love Linux & have used it as my server OS of choice for 5 years now. But to this day, I can't deal with it on the desktop. This applet worked just fine for me on Win2k with JDK1.4 and Opera 6.1 as my browser.
By the way, the applet is really cool - I love this concept!
Could someone host a screenshot? I'd love to see this work, but the java on my browser craps out on me, so I only see an empty grey box.
This reminds me of the Virtual Theasaurus. Seems like it's doing about the same thing, but it a much simpler way.
Java is too slow to do such intense computationalizations! They should use something fast, like VBScript!
<Amanda`> I just went out to the parking lot in my bathrobe to exchange warez CDs.
Well, that's what you get by using "the matchstick browser"
Notice the "patent pending" notice on the site.
While this is a delightful little entertainment, and quite fun to play with (though a bit of a hog while it's running, not to mention my difficulty in getting it to run in Mozilla on Win32), semantic networks have been around forever. Let's hope the patent application is meant to keep things like this in the public domain, rather than fencing in yet another area of the commons.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
(c) Sex with a stallion. (I just LOVE that full feeling in my rear passage. Don't you?)
Ummm... did you know that (in the US) blind people are allowed to recieve copyrighten books for free if they are certifiably blind. There is actually an undertaking to convert novels into a form usable by the blind. Ahh just found a link.
If textarc.org continues to publish their stuff with dark grey text on a black bacground they're not reacing for the masses.
I have to higlight the text in order to be able to read it.
Current tally from W.Bradford Paley's Bio:
Semi-interesting javascripts - 1
Dates with real women in the last 6 months - 0
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Today's Top Deals
How???? He had to go to the site and then go to the prefs in his browser to turn on Java and then click on the link that said it was going to analyze the entire text of some long book and make pretty pictures out of it...in Java. (and if he didn't have to turn on Java, then he's probably due for some more disappointment in the future) What alternative does the site have to make their research available to others? Should they have just put up this note?
We are doing some cool research, and we've
developed this really cool tool that we'd
love to let you play with, but we're worried
that some individuals may have unreasonable
expectations of how powerful their machines
are and we don't want to burst their bubbles,
so instead, we'll just keep it to ourselves.
that's just silly. I mean, the system recommendation contains the following:
Sounds like a good enough warning to me that if you're using a 486 with 32MB of RAM over a dialup, that, perhaps, you don't want to try running it.
IMHO,
Michael
(the applet was tested on better hardware, but I did well enough with 98/IE6/550MHz/64MB)"
No wonder you think Windows is a slow crashy peice of poop.
Linux sucks!
Just for fun, I loaded the Old and New Testaments into the thing just to see if there could be any interesting and or humorous relations in the text. One thing that I thought was mighty interesting was the fact that "God" was smack dab in the center of everything.
Clicking on "God" linked to damn near everything. My screen lit up yellow like the sun. Well, I guess that's one book that knows its topic!
Unforunately, the text is so large that it really didn't render very beautifully. It was really jumbled. It might be time to crank up to super-res...
-AP
beowulf
/--------\
|first post|
\--------/
grits
i do not know what this is exactly good for, but i do know that it is fscking beautiful!
caroll the old mathematician would have loved it too i believe.
keep it simple.
And that's not even Konqi 3...
Konqueror 2.2.2, Java 1.3.1, Linux.
The filesystem is the package manager
One of my major complaints with English (North American bias here...I should say Literature) in high school was that we learned about creative prose or patterns in word choice from teachers. Basically, they told us who used what word choice and we repeated these thoughts on exams. I really like that this tool adds something more concrete to such statements...I'm waiting for some recent Tom Wolfe novels to appear in the Gutenburg database so I can confirm my suspicion that he overuses 'solar plexus'.
I thought Slashdot should moderate such article.
Now, I guess /. will moderate myself :(
it ran perfectly (if it was supposed to make my comp burst into flames (joking) ) but seriously. i wasn't that surprised that it worked fine (1333 mgz cpu, 512 meg memory under linux:~)