The Listening Post

The Listening Post is a networked installation that culls text from online and displays them and synthesizes them.
This looks anticipates a project on the sonification of text that I am working on with Bill Farkas who has developed some cool sonification systems.

A9: Amazon Search Engine

Search Technologies” href=”http://a9.com/”>A9.com is a new search engine site from Amazon that lets you search inside books in addition to searching the web. There is supposed to be a feature to allow you to link notes to what you find and you can, if you get an account, keep information about your search history.

Remember when people speculated that Netscape could become your OS? As Google and other (pseudo) portals add features we are returning to the possibility of a network portal OS. My kids use MSN for more and more, I use Google for more and more – at what point do I ditch the “personal” computer for an environment available through any networked device?

News Bursts

Daypop Top News Bursts is a site that lists clusters of news stories around word bursts. They don’t give the algorithm, but it seems to do something like what Google News does – provides clusters of stories that have similar subjects and which have a “heightened useage of certain words…”

Can this be used on a text? Could you treat a text with paragraphs as if each paragraph were a story in time. Sentences could be pulled that best show the heightened usage of words. Something like that…

Speed Reader

Rob of isagen and I were talking about different types of visualization and sonification of texts. One idea is to have a sonification of a text where keywords are whispered from different directions. A text would be processed into a short sonoric summary. Rob has build scrollers that show the news scrolling by in a window as a way of allowing the user to keep an eye on a (changing) text. I came across this Speed Reader that does something like this here.

What if one ran a process that summarized a text and the summary (a list of frequency sorted words) was then played back through such a reader?

Rebecca V.1

Rebecca v.1

v.1 of Rebecca can be played without specialized software. You only need access to a server with the appropriate programming tools. The system is set up so that the players have Read, Write and Execute access to a directory. The start.text is placed in a subdirectory called “startText”. As each player makes a move they must create a new subdirectory with their initials and the number of the move. In that subdirectory they should place their code (move.program) and the output.text. In the game root directory there should be a shared html file called game.html that is used to keep track of the moves and which has links to the moves.
Continue reading Rebecca V.1