[FW:ACM Tech News] "Data-Mining" on Shakespeare

Hi,

 

Not long ago, I was just thinking about this possibility when I was in my under program.  At that time, I majored in psychology, and had particular interest in cognitive science.  I thought literature people would refuse to do this forever, but some other people really did this.

Try to imagine that, someday, computer can do creative writing by itself, and what is the use of mankind?

 

T.S.Yo

 

---

"Data-Mining"
California Computer News (10/27/04)

A multi-university collaboration between English literature and computer science researchers seeks to apply data mining technology to digital library collections. The effort spearheaded by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) has won almost $600,000 in funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a data-mining scheme that can find interesting new patterns in volumes on British and American literature. GSLIS dean John Unsworth says statistical analysis has often been used in literary study, but this is one of the earliest applications of data mining. The project builds on existing data-mining tools already developed by the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and will be applied to terabytes of humanities resources made available online. Unsworth says complex analysis of broad sets of works would yield interesting new discoveries and lead to better targeted literary research. The project team already tested their technology on the full set of Shakespeare plays, finding that "Othello" shared many characteristics with comedies, pointing a way to interesting academic study. Unsworth says the technology will prove even more useful when applied to larger sets of work. Collaborators on the Web-based Text Mining and Visualization for Humanities Digital Libraries project include English literature academics from the University of Georgia and the University of Maryland, plus computer science colleagues from the University of Virginia and other institutions.
Click Here to View Full Article