Text Technology and TAPoR – Page 7

RDUES: WebCorp: The Web as Corpus

The Research and Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES) of UCE of Birmingham has a tool WebCorp: The Web as Corpus which searches google for a term and then goes to the top 199 documents Google identifies and searches them. It takes a while and works like our Googlizer, but produces more verbose results. It produces a concordance organized by document with links to a full word frequency list for the doc. The advanced search form has some interesting features, including the ability to point it at other engines.

UCE Birmingham is strange place from the web. UCE stands for “University of Central England” and you have to go deep to the At A Glance : History Of UCE Birmingham to find this out. (There’s no point explaining it to outsiders anywhere on the web page.) They seem to have been formed out of all the little colleges, polytechnics and schools in the area in 1992.

Dieselpoint Search and Navigation

Dieselpoint has Search & Navigation Software and services for large-scale document management. They have a good SWF demo of how their technology can be integrated into a portal, see Portal Demo. They claim to have an innovative way of “using the attributes of a data set to build menus that allow a user to browse in an intelligent way.” (See Faceted Navigation – Guided Navigation) It looks like they license their Java code for others to integrate into other products too.

Jefferson on free ideas and light

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

This quote, from a letter by Jeffereson to Isaac McPherson, appears widely in discussions about copyright and technology. Interesting how it connects ideas, instruction and light (not to mention “tapers” or tapors.) See for example, LIBREria.org’s Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. I also came across it in Mark Katz’s Capturing Sound where he discusses MP3s and Napster-like technologies. (See page 163). Katz in turn finds it in an article by Barlow. In short, the image of lighting one taper from another provides a metaphor for “nonrivalrous resources” – resources where possession and consumption by one person doesn’t diminish access by another.
Continue reading Jefferson on free ideas and light

Breadth of Text

The call for papers for the next CaSTA conference has been posted. See CaSTA 2006: Breadth of Text – A Joint Computer Science and Humanities Computing Conference. This year the conference will be at the University of New Brunswick and will be a joint conference with Computer Science.

The Submission deadline is March 15th. A PDF of the Call can be Downloaded Here.

TAPoR Portal: Public Release 1

The TAPoR Project for which I am the project leader is releasing its first public version. See Text Analysis Portal. Anyone can now get a basic account by filling out a form.
It’s been a long haul to this version and I’m afraid of all the bugs users will find when they try it. Oh well, that’s how we get from beta to full release.

Unstructured Information Management Architecture

IBM drives text mining via standard search framework is an article about the release by IBM of an open framewrok for knowledge management and text mining.

Another IBM project is TAKMI (Text Analysis and Knowledge Mining) – see Text analysis and knowledge mining system.

Text Mining: IBM Buisiness Intelligence Knowledge Base

IBM runs a ITtoolbox or “Networking Knowledge Base” for the “Professional IT Community. They have a section on Business Intelligence Text Mining with good links to papers and a link to a section on tools.

Virginia Tool Summit

Last week I was at a Summit on Digital Tools for the Humanities organized at the University of Virginia. The Summit produced an interesting set of recommendations for next steps in tool development. See my wiki conference notes on the WikiTADA. The final session that I helped with came up with a neat idea for what to do about web-wide exploration that Roy Rosenzweig wrote up with my help. See Exploration of Resources – ToolCenter.

TAPoR Persona Research

Audrey Carr has a blog now to report on the TAPoR Persona Research she is doing. She is developing a set of personas for the types of people that might use the TAPoR portal from which to develop usability scenarios that we can use in designing the portal.

Jo: Skinning Blog

TAPoR Skinning Research is a blog by a student who is doing a cool project on skinning for TAPoR. It is an example of open research and how blogging ideas can weave in people.