Textual Analysis in NY Times

[Patty Davies]

At 05:08 PM 4/16/02 -0400, Mark A Mandel wrote:
>On Tue, 16 Apr 2002, Grant Barrett wrote:
>
>
>
>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?


Yes, I found it difficult to read


>#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