Category: Text Analysis

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.

WuffWuffWare (yes, I’m serious) has a small text annotation tool for the Mac called, AnalyzeText. It sounds like you can use it like a highlighting and annotating tool, but it also has a concordancer built in. But does it roll over when told to the way my dog does? Tha’s about all the text analysis my dog Leo does.

This is thanks to Alex.

Is Gematria text analysis? Alex has pointed me to a Gematriculator that seems to poke fun at the idea by letting you provide a URL or paste text in. I have no idea what the affiliation is of the homokaasu sect. (The FAQ says “homokaasu is Finnish for “gay gas”.)

TagCloud is both a way of showing word or tag frequency and tool for content analysis. TagCloud.com has a tool that I think will give you a tagcloud for placing in your blog. The words are sized by importance and link to lists or related entries. A cool idea of content analysis interface that provides a dynamic folksonomy.

TagCloud.com links to a good article on Folksonomy in the Wikipedia.