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)"
...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.
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!