Text Technology and TAPoR – Page 6

TagCrowd

TagCrowd is a tool that lets you generate a word cloud from text typed in or uploaded. It has a nice clean interface. Unlike our TAPoRware Word Cloud tool the results are HTML so they can be easily integrated into a web page like this,

created at TagCrowd.com

They have a long list of blacklists of words. I wonder where they came from. Thanks to Paola for this.

Hairy Messaging

Hairy Mail is a the most unusual messaging environment I’ve encountered. Your write a message and it spreads Sodium Hydroxide (found in hair removal and cigarettes) over a hairy back in the shape of your message. If you press OK it removes the hair from the back.

So, what’s the point? Well it’s part of a site thetruth.com which promotes an anti-smoking message. The point is that Sodium Hydroxide is found in cigarettes, which can’t be good. The Hairy-Mail Flash toy sends your message as an e-mail.

CNW Group: Mediavantage

The CNW Group that has it’s Canadian base in Toronto has a new service called MEDIAVANTAGE that has many of the features of a multimedia news crawling, managing, and visualizing service. From the Flash intro it looks like users define keywords to track. Mediavantage then shows you results from different sources. It can send alerts and graphs result history.

The interesting part is that they track TV news and provide text summaries that look like the text off close captioning. Subsets of results can be shared by e-mail and PDF. This is a news mining tool for business that offers a model for what Web Mining for Research might look like.

Thanks to Terry for this.

The State of the Union in Words: Rich Prospect Browsing

The New York Times has a wonderful example of rich prospect browsing in The State of the Union in Words: A Look at the 34,000 State of the Union Words Delivered of George W. Bush. They show the different State of the Union addresses with the pattern searched for in red on the left. On the right they show frequency bubbles for key words including the one you search for. Rich prospect browsing is an idea I learned about from Stan Ruecker – see the Humanities Visualization projects he is involved in.

Thanks to Daniel for showing this to me.

Comparing Texts

Matt asked me if we can use TAPoRware tools to compare different texts so I wrote a short recipe on Comparing Two Texts. This assumes that the texts you are comparing are not different versions of the same text, but completely different texts.

It strikes me that we have to think through how the TAPoRware tools could be adapted for comparison.

Analysis Tool Bar

We have developed a TAPoRware Analysis Tool Bar that can be embedded in any web page. You will find it floating in the upper right of this page. The tool bar code can be placed in a blog or wiki and edited. See our documentation.

Natural Language Toolkit

The Natural Language Toolkit is an open source “suite of program modules, data sets and tutorials supporting research and teaching in computational linguistics and natural language processing.” They also provide corpora for download and experimentation.

Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men

Shakespeare and Queen's Men Image I went to the first Hamilton performance of the Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men project. SQM is a SSHRC funded Research/Creation project that is reconstructing how plays would have been put on in the late 16th century during Shakespeare’s apprenticeship. I will be involved in the internet research site where we hope to put up streaming video footage from the project that documents the reconstruction research. The play I saw, King Leir, directed by Peter Cockett, was terrific. The procession of dignitaries included McMaster’s president and AVP (Academic) Fred Hall. They sat at the back of the stage where us less important types could see if they fell asleep during the performance. King Leir repeatedly addressed them when talking about the evils of flattery (the main theme of this version.)

A review in the National Post discusses the Toronto performance of the King Leir which I saw.

A more stimulating sidelight on Shakespeare in general and King Lear in particular can be had from Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men, a joint theatrical-academic project on view at the Glen Morris Theatre, on the University of Toronto campus, and subsequently beyond. The Queen’s Men were an Elizabethan theatre company who flourished briefly in the 1580s, in London and on tour, before disappearing from the record in mysterious, and conceivably sinister, circumstances. This was just before Shakespeare began his career, and the present enterprise is staging and discussing three plays that definitely or conceivably influenced him.

Meditation on Electronic Tools

A tool would have a handle with grooves to hold tight. It’s easy to swing into place.

It would have an inhuman steel end. An end unlike my soft flesh. Perhaps the nail dead at the end of the digit.

A tool scratches out its world. A tool outreaches, extends the hand in sight, and where it doesn’t fit (so often), it scrapes a groove. It claws what it can afford.

And when it’s finished there’s a pop, a clunk, a ping, and a burr to be swept away. When it’s left, the palm is open to stroke the surface of the craft. A satisfaction puts the tool away.

So few parts of the world fit this tool, other than my hand. Perhaps they are not made for work but for the stroking, the holding, and the gripping turn.

Which is why I need so many of them, within reach, laid out in frames, carried in bags, on belts, and ready-at-hand and unforseen.

Then, I’ll pause in the workshop and not do anthing at all. I’ll hold these tools in my mind which is not how to use them.

Images all from the TAPoR portal and TAPoRware.

Ask E.T.: Sparklines: theory and practice

Deficit Sparkline (Sparkline of US deficit over time) Sparklines: theory and practice is a thread in Edward Tufte’s Ask E.T. forum (which is a great place to follow discussions on design issues.) The thread starts with images of some pages from Tufte’s new book, Beautiful Evidence (2006) on sparklines which are defined as “intense, simple, word-sized graphics”. The sparkline at the beginning of this entry is from the Sparkline PHP Graphing Library. Another source of sparkline tools is Bissantz sparkline tools. Thanks to Shawn for this link.
So how can sparklines be woven into text anlysis environments? Small distribution graphs could be included with lists of word or KWIC displays in tools like the TAPoRware tools.