Attached should be simple Perl script called wordcloud.pl. Initialize it with a hash of words and associated integers. Output rudimentary HTML in the form of a word cloud. This hack was used to create the word cloud in a posting called “Last of the Mohicans and services against texts“.
Here is a word cloud representing James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans; A narrative of 1757. It is a trivial example of how libraries can provide services against documents, not just the documents themselves.
scout heyward though duncan uncas little without own eyes before hawkeye indian young magua much place long time moment cora hand again after head returned among most air huron toward well few seen many found alice manner david hurons voice chief see words about know never woods great rifle here until just left soon white heard father look eye savage side yet already first whole party delawares enemy light continued warrior water within appeared low seemed turned once same dark must passed short friend back instant project around people against between enemies way form munro far feet nor
While I am not a literary scholar, I am able to read a book and write a synopsis.
Set during the French And Indian War in what was to become upper New York State, two young women are being escorted from one military camp to another. Along the way the hero, Natty Bumppo (also known by quite a number of other names, most notably “Hawkeye” or the “scout”), alerts the convoy that their guide, Magua, is treacherous. Sure enough, Magua kidnaps the women. Fights and battles ensue in a pristine and idyllic setting. Heroic deeds are accomplished by Hawkeye and the “last of the Mohicans” — Uncas. Everybody puts on disguises. In the end, good triumphs over evil but not completely.
Cooper’s style is verbose. Expressive. Flowery. On this level it was difficult to read. Too many words. In the other hand the style was consistent, provided a sort of pattern, and enabled me to read the novel with a certain rhythm.
There were a couple of things I found particularly interesting. First, the allusion to “relish“. I consider this to be a common term now-a-days, but Cooper thought it needed elaboration when used to describe food. Cooper used the word within a relatively short span of text to describe condiment as well as a feeling. Second, I wonder whether or not Cooper’s description of Indians built on existing stereotypes or created them. “Hugh!”
The word cloud I created is simple and rudimentary. From my perspective, it is just a graphical representation of a concordance, and a concordance has to be one of the most basic of indexes. This particular word cloud (read “concordance” or “index”) allows the reader to get a sense of a text. It puts words in context. It allows the would-be reader to get an overview of the document.
This particular implementation is not pretty, nor is it quick, but it is functional. How could libraries create other services such as these? Everybody can find and get data and information these days. What people desire is help understanding and using the documents. Providing services against texts such as word clouds (concordances) might be one example.
How feasible and/or practical do you think “crowd sourcing” TEI files would be?
I like writing in my books. In fact, I even have a particular system for doing it. Circled things are the subjects of sentences. Squared things are proper nouns. Underlined things connected to the circled and squared things are definitions. Moreover, my books are filled with marginalia. Comments. Questions. See alsos. I call this process ELMTGML (Eric Lease Morgan’s Truly Graphic Mark-up Language), and I find it a whole lot more useful than the use of simple highlighter pen that where all the mark-up has the same value. Florescent yellow.
I think I could easily “crosswalk” my mark-up process to TEI mark-up because there are TEI elements for many of things I highlight. Given such a thing I could mark-up texts using my favorite editor and then create stylesheets that turn on or turn off my commentary.
Suppose many classic texts were marked-up in TEI. Suppose there were stylesheets that allowed you to turn on or turn off other people’s commentary/annotations or allowed you to turn on or turn off particular people’s commentary/annotation. Wouldn’t that be interesting?
Moreover, what if some sort of tool, widget, or system were created that allowed anybody to add commentary to texts in the form of TEI mark-up. Do you think this would be feasible? Useful?
It is important to understand the differences between metadata and data structures. This posting outlines some of the differences between the two.
Every once in a while people ask me for advice that I am usually very happy to give because the answers usually involve succinctly articulating some of the things floating around in my head. Today someone asked:
I’ve been looking at Dublin Core and looking at MODS to arrive at the best metadata for converting MARC records into human readable format. Dublin Core lacks specificity, but maybe I don’t understand it that well. Plus, I cannot find what parts of the MARC are mapped to what–where are the “rules.” I look at Mods and find it overwhelming and I’m not even sure of its intended purpose.
Below is how I replied.
First of all, please understand that Dublin Core is really just a list of fifteen or so metadata element names. Title. Creator. Publisher. Format. Identifier. Etc. Moreover, each of these names come with simple definitions denoting the type of content they are expected to represent. Dublin Core is NOT a metadata format. Dublin Core does not define how data should be encoded. It is simply a list of elements.
MARC is a metadata format — a data structure — a container — a “bit bucket”. The MARC standard defines how data should be encoded. First there is a leader. It is always 24 characters long and different characters in the leader denote different things. Then there is the directory — a “map” of where the data resides in the file. Finally, there is the data itself which is divided into indicators, fields, and subfields. This MARC standard has been used to hold bibliographic data as well as authority data. In one case the 245 field is intended to encode title/author information. In another case the 245 means something else. In both cases they are using MARC — a data structure.
XML is second type of data structure. Instead of leaders, directories, and data sections, XML is made up of nested elements where the elements of the file are denoted by a Document Type Definition (DTD) or XML schema. XML is much more flexible than MARC. XML is much more verbose than MARC. There are many industries supporting XML. MARC is supported by a single industry. MARC was cool in its time, but it has grown long in the tooth. XML is definitely the data structure to use now-a-days.
MARCXML is a specific flavor of XML used to contain 100% of the data in a bibliographic MARC file. It works. It does what it is suppose to do, but in order to really take advantage of it the user needs to know that the 245 field contains title information, the 100 field contains author information, etc. In other words, to use MARCXML the user needs to know the “secret code book” translating library tags into human-readable elements. Moreover, MARCXML retains all of the “syntactical” sugar of MARC. Last name first. First name last. Parentheses around birth and death dates. “pbk” to denote paperback. Etc.
MODS is a second flavor of XML also designed to contain bibliographic data. In at least a couple of ways, MODS is much better than MARCXML. First and foremost, MODS removes the need for “secret code book” because the element names are human-readable, not integers. Second, some but not all, of the syntactical sugar is removed.
When it comes to bibliographic data, I advocate MODS over MARCXML any day. Not perfect, but a step in the right direction. There are utilities to convert MARC to MARCXML and then to MODS. Conversion is almost a trivial computing problem to solve.
When it comes to choosing the “right” metadata standard it is often about choosing the “right” flavor of XML. VRACore, for example, is more amenable to describing image data. TEI is best suited to describe — mark-up — prose and/or poetry. EAD is the “best” candidate for archival finding aids. Authority data can be represented in a relatively new XML flavor called MADS. METS is used, more or less, to create collections of metadata objects. RDF is similar to METS and is intended to form the basis of the Semantic Web. SKOS is an XML format for thesauri.
In short, there are two things to consider. First, what is your data? Bibliographic? Image? Full texts? Second, what data structure do you want to employ? MARC? XML? Something else such as a tab-delimited file? (Ick!) Or maybe a relational database schema? (Maybe.) In most cases I expect XML will be the data structure you want to employ, and then the question is, “What XML DTD or schema do I want to exploit?”
I allude to many of these issues in an XML workshop I wrote called XML In Libraries.
‘Hope this helps.
