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)"

Comments

Re:Please...

[teddlesruss]

i agree, it sux that something opens a max window over your desktop without asking permission, chews up cpu without asking permission, and then fscks up as soon as you click on it and has to be killed by hand.

shame textarc, shame!

you can be sure whom i'll never consider for anything whatsoever, ever again...