Textual Analysis in NY Times

[Mark A Mandel]

On Tue, 16 Apr 2002, Grant Barrett wrote:

#>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
                      ****

Oh, yeah? ;-)\

BTW, do others find this as hard to read as I do, with URLs sprinkled
through the text like poppy seeds on a Brooklyn bagel?

#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)."
#

-- Mark A. Mandel
   Linguist at Large