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Words That Speak a Thousand Pictures

Posted by timothy on from the high-tech-meets-expired-copyrights dept.

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)"

2 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. This is pretty interesting by kvn299 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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!

  2. Java... 'nuff said by lamour · · Score: 2, Insightful
    the behavior of that site was not in line with most (considerate) websites, it is reasonable that the poster would be annoyed.

    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:

    • 600 Mhz Pentium III or faster
    • 256 Mb of RAM
    • A fast internet connection
    • No other memory-intensive programs running
    • Netscape 6.2 (the most recent) browser (RECOMMENDED for fastest Java)


    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