Category: Text Analysis

Twitter hands your data to the highest bidder, but not to you

The Globe and Mail had a very interesting article on how Twitter hands your data to the highest bidder, but not to you. The article talks about how Twitter is archiving your data, selling it, but not letting you access your old tweets. The article mentions that DataSift is one company that has been licensed to mine the Twitter archives. DataSift presents itself as the “the world’s most powerful and scalable platform for managing large volumes of information from a variety of social data sources.” In effect they do real-time text analysis for industry. Here is what they say in What we do:

DataSift offers the most powerful and sophisticated tools for extracting value from Social Data. The amount of content that Internet users are creating and sharing through Social Media is exploding. DataSift offers the best tools for collecting, filtering and analyzing this data.

Social Data is more complicated to process and analyze because it is unstructured. DataSift’s platform has been built specifically to process large volumes of this unstructured data and derive value from it.

One thing that DataSift has is a curation language called CDSL (Curated Stream Definition Language) for querying the cloud of data they gather. The provide an example of what you can with it:

Here’s an example, just for illustration, of a complex filter that you could build with only four lines of CSDL code: imagine that you want to look at information from Twitter that mentions the iPad. Suppose you want to include content written in English or Spanish but exclude any other languages, select only content written within 100 kilometers of New York City, and exclude Tweets that have been retweeted fewer than five times. You can write that in just four lines of CSDL!

It would be interesting to develop an academic alternative similar to Archive-It, but for real-time social media tracking.

The Old Bailey Datawarehousing Interface

The latest version of our Old Bailey Datawarehousing Interface is up. This was the Digging Into Data project that got TAPoR, Zotero and Old Bailey working together. One of the things we built was an advanced visualization environment for the Old Bailey. This was programmed by John Simpson following ideas from Joerg Sanders. Milena Radzikowska did the interface design work and I wrote emails.

One feature we have added is the broaDHcast widget that allows projects like Criminal Intent to share announcements. This was inspired partly by the issues of keeping distributed projects like TAPoR, Zotero and Old Bailey informed.

Perlin: Interactive Map of Pride and Prejudice

As I mentioned in my post on the GRAND conference, Ken Perlin showed a number of interesting Java apps that illustrated visual ideas. One was a Interactive Map of Pride and Prejudice. This interactive map is a rich prospect of the whole text which you can move around to see particular parts. You can search for words (or strings) and see where they appear in the text. You can select some text and it searches. The interface is simple and intuitive. You can see how Perlin talks about it in his blog. I also recommend you look at his other experiments.

Prism: Collaborative Interpretation

Prism is the coolest idea I have come across in a long time. Coming from the University of Virginia Scholar’s Lab, Prism is a collaborative interpretation environment. Someone comes up with categories like “Rhetoric”, “Orientalism” and “Social Darwinism” for a text like Notes on the State of Virginia. Then people (with accounts, which you can get freely) go through and mark passages. This creates overlapping interpretative markup of the sort you used to get with COCOA in TACT, but unlike TACT, many people can do the interpretation – it can be crowdsourced.

They are planning some visualizations of the results including what look like the types of visualizations that TACT gave where you can see words distributed over tagged areas.

Bethany Nowviskie explains the background to the project in this Scholar’s Lab post.

Robo-Readers Used to Grade Test Essays

A nice story from the New York Times by Michael Winerip, Robo-Readers Used to Grade Test Essays (April 22, 2012) talks automated essay scoring software (AES). The story first reports a study from the University of Akron that showed that AES software is comparable to human graders (see A Win for the Robo-Readers by Steve Kolowich from Inside Higher Ed.) The NYT story goes then to report how Les Perelman, a director of writing at MIT, has shown how you can game AES tools. Among other things they don’t check facts or truth so you can write all sorts of outrageous things and still get a good score from AES. The story discusses some of the patterns that get good scores like lexical variety and long sentences. The story ends with the possibility that AES could be matched by essay writing software,

Two former students who are computer science majors told him (Perelman) that they could design an Android app to generate essays that would receive 6’s from e-Rater. He says the nice thing about that is that smartphones would be able to submit essays directly to computer graders, and humans wouldn’t have to get involved.

Particularly interesting is an essay Perelman wrote to show how poor essays can game the system. I wish I could say that I never saw writing like this and that therefore there was no danger of AES systems rewarding the poor writing found in real essays,

In today’s society, college is ambiguous. We need it to live, but we also need it to love. Moreover, without college most of the world’s learning would be egregious. College, however, has myriad costs. One of the most important issues facing the world is how to reduce college costs. Some have argued that college costs are due to the luxuries students now expect. Others have argued that the costs are a result of athletics. In reality, high college costs are the result of excessive pay for teaching assistants.

Whistleblower: The NSA is Lying–U.S. Government Has Copies of Most of Your Emails

According to National Security Agency (of the USA) whistleblower William Binney, the NSA probably has most of our email. See the video Whistleblower: The NSA is Lying–U.S. Government Has Copies of Most of Your Emails. The question then is what they are doing with it? He mentions that the email can be “put it into forms of graphing, which is building relationships or social networks for everybody, and then you watch it over time, you can build up knowledge about everyone in the country.” (see transcript on page). In other words they could (are) building a large social graph that they can use in various ways.

In the transcript of the longer video Binney talks about various programs developed to filter out all the information:

Well, it was called Thin Thread. I mean, Thin Thread was our—a test program that we set up to do that. By the way, I viewed it as we never had enough data, OK? We never got enough. It was never enough for us to work at, because I looked at velocity, variety and volume as all positive things. Volume meant you got more about your target. Velocity meant you got it faster. Variety meant you got more aspects. These were all positive things. All we had to do was to devise a way to use and utilize all of those inputs and be able to make sense of them, which is what we did.

Binney goes on to talk about the code named Stellar Wind program that Bush authorized and then was forced to change after a revolt of some sort in the Justice Department in 2004. Stories tell of senior Bush advisors trying to get Ashcroft to sign authorization papers for the program while he was in the hospital.  As for Stellar Wind, it seems to be mostly about metadata – the date, to, and from of emails that you could use to build a diachronic social graph which is what Binney was talking about. Strictly speaking this would be social network analysis rather than text analysis, but they might have supplemented the system with some keyword capabilities. Another story from Time points out the problem with such analysis – that it generates too many vague false positives. “Leads from the Stellar Wind program were so vague and voluminous that field agents called them “Pizza Hut cases” — ostensibly suspicious calls that turned out to be takeout food orders.”

Either way, these hints give us a tantalizing view into how text and network analysis is being experimented with. Are there any useful research applications?

Leximancer

Susan pointed me to Leximancer which is a commercial text analysis tool that creates mind maps of your information. I’m struck by how compelling people find mind maps.

Leximancer enables you to navigate the complexity of text in a uniquely automated fashion. Our software identifies ‘Concepts’ within the text – not merely keywords but focused clusters of related, defining terms as conceptualised by the Author. Not according to a predefined dictionary or thesaurus.

The Concepts are presented in a compelling, interactive display so that you can clearly visualise and interrogate their inter-connectedness and co-occurrence – which is as important as the Concepts themselves – right down to the original text that spawned them.

 

@MentionMachine: Who’s up, who’s down on Twitter?

Reading the Washington Post I was annoyed by a panel at the bottom of my screen with their @MentionMachine tracks the presidential candidates: Who’s up, who’s down on Twitter?. The @MentionMachine tracks Twitter mentions using the Twitter API and also media mentions using Trove. This is real-time social media text analysis. The Washington Post blog page on @MentionMachine argues that “Twitter was the real-time warning system” that could tell us which candidates were trending up or down. I wonder if that is reliably true or only true in selective cases.

Stephen Wolfram Blog : The Personal Analytics of My Life

Thanks to Bethany on twitter I came across this great post by Stephen Wolfram on The Personal Analytics of My Life. Wolfram is not the first person to use computers to track his activities and then understand himself. Microsoft Research has a project MyLifeBits that is “an attempt to fulfill Vannevar Bush‘s vision of an automated store of the documents, pictures (including those taken automatically), and sounds an individual has experienced in his lifetime, to be accessed with speed and ease.” The project is digitizing and following Gordon Bell and they have released a book Your Life, Uploaded. We could even go back to the ancient Greek aphorism “Know theyself” that motivated Socrates and which, in its Latin form (temet nosce), shows up over the door of the Oracle in the Matrix.

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