Category: Text Analysis

Rollyo: Roll Your Own Search Engine is another service that lets you create custom search engines that only search a “Searchroll” set of domains/sites. You can have multiple Searchrolls and you can create small Rollyo search panels for your site.

They are onto something, especially if they allowed hierarchies of shared (public) Searchrolls. The down side of the service is the limit on sites you can include (25) and the advertising that shows up in the results.

Here is one I created form my personal website www.geoffreyrockwell.com:

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Amazon has recently added a neat feature to the pages on certain books. If you go, for example to, Amazon.com: The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture: Books: John Battelle and mouse-over the image of the book it gives you:

• SIPs: Statistically Improbably Phrases
• CAPs: Capitalized Phrases
• and the ability to search inside the book and get a concordance.

They are providing a simple form of text analysis right on the book page. You can click on a SIP and see what other books (for sale on Amazon) have a high frequency of that improbable phrase.

A Kaleidoscope of Digital American Literature by Martha Brogan with assistance from DaphnÈe Rentfrow (Council on Library and Information Resources, Digital Library Federation, Washington, D.C., Sept. 2005) is a deep report on the state digital resources for the study of American literature. It concludes that while there are some excellent resources, things are fragmented and there need to be better tools. The MLA is criticized as “missing in action” compared to other organizations, which is probably not fair, but indicates an a problem of perception. The MLA isn’t viewed as leading in this area.
Continue reading Tools to the Rescue?

The Final Report for the University of Virginia Summit on Digital Tools for the Humanities is now posted as a PDF at the site. The describes how we identified the opportunity for new tools to support these areas of humanities scholarship:

• Interpretation
• Exploration of Resources
• Collaboration
• Visualization of Time, Space, and Uncertainty

I posted on this before at grockwel: Research Notes: Virginia Tool Summit.

Who creates the software for real-time IP traffic monitoring? Narus is a company named in a Wired story about Whistle-Blower Outs NSA Spy Room. The page about NarusInsight says they provide,

CALEA- and ETSI-compliant modules for lawful intercept featuring a robust warrant management system. Capabilities include playback of streaming media (for example, VoIP), rendering of Web pages, examination of e-mails and the ability to analyze the payload/attachments of e-mail or file transfer protocols.

The Wired story is about an EFF Class-Action Lawsuit Against AT&T that accuses “the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans’ communications.”

A story by Suevon Lee, English Language Hits 1 Billion Words in My Way News talks about the Oxford English Corpus and how their “massive langauge research database … has officially hit a total of 1 billion words…” The corpus is collected by a crawler and is analyzed by Sketch Engine. I can’t figure out if people can access the Oxford Corpus, but one can get an account to try Sketch Engine.

Mark Olsen and Shlomo Argamon have just published a viewpoint in the Communications of the ACM titled, “Toward meaningful computing” that argues, (among other things)

Current initiatives by Google, Yahoo, and a consortium of European research institutions to digitize the holdings of major research libraries worldwide promise to make the world’s knowledge accessible as never before. Yet in order to completely realize this promise, computer scientists must still develop systems that deal effectively with meaning, not just with data and information. This grand research and development challenge motivates our call here to improve collaboration between computer scientists and scholars in the humanities.

They set an ambitious, but I think, doable agenda for us.

Announcing an interesting call for position statements for a Digital Tools Summit for Linguistics. The summit will run from June 22nd to the 23rd, 2006 at Michigan State University. The deadline is March 31st, 2006. For more information see DTS-L web site.
Continue reading Digital Tools Summit for Linguistics

Juxta has just been released. This is an application for comparing and collating multiple witnesses to a single text. It is open source and has an elegant and clean interface. It was developed at the University of Virginia by Applied Resarch in Patacriticism with funding awarded to Jerome McGann from Mellon.