Textual Analysis in NY Times

[Grant Barrett]

>From Slashdot:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/16/0449204&mode=flat&tid=152

"The New York Times has an article (
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/15/arts/15ARTS.html )on TextArc (
http://textarc.org/ )(created by http://www.didi.com/~brad/ "W.Bradford
Paley), a site that 'AIDS in the discovery of patterns and and concepts in
arbitrary text" (from the http://textarc.org/TextArcOverview.pdf detailed
overview at TextArc). The site serves an applet that performs the task
(texts on which analysis is available include http://textarc.org/Alice2.html
Alice in Wonderland , http://textarc.org/Hamlet2.html Hamlet, and
http://textarc.org/Thousands2.html thousands of others--made available by
http://www.promo.net/pg/ Project Gutenberg). The NYTimes article reports
that Paley found that "Dracula", which relies on a strong storyline had a
few keywords clustered hotly at the center, and that the metaphoric
"Frankenstein" generated a circle of 50 words of modest intensity that faded
towards the edges. "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" with evenly
distributed key words produces tight and round lines and "Alice in
Wonderland" produces loopier lines. Check it out! (the applet was tested on
http://textarc.org/Thousands.html better hardware, but I did well enough
with 98/IE6/550MHz/64MB)."