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rather: Wasting time and attention on useless statistics and pointless visualizations.
Says the one with a nickname from mythology/fantasy (Darkover-Cycle)... ;-)
Incidentally, I never read anything by Lovecraft, but am a big fan of Tolkien. I came up with this nickname on the spot.
"Visualizing English Text" seems more accurate a title. Cute process, but the result is entirely generic.
Mapping semantic associations would be more interesting. Something akin to http://xkcd.com/657/ generated by the in-text juxtaposition of names & related verbs.
Why does everyone find the Silmarillion hard to read? Am I the only one, who had no problems with that style?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Says the one with a nickname from mythology/fantasy (Darkover-Cycle)... ;-)
I'm not sure what you mean. I was criticizing the viz, not the literature. Incidentally, I never read anything by Lovecraft, but am a big fan of Tolkien. I came up with this nickname on the spot.
Where's the sentence length statistics? Average word length? Commas per sentence? All are surely much more indicative of reading difficulty than that "originality index" he came up with. Why didn't the author try the most obvious test of reading difficulty of all: Flesch-Kincaid? [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabil...
Hi, author here. First, it's she, not he. Second, because I hadn't heard about that obvious test at all back then. I never pretended to do a superserious scientific analysis but rather answer to the questions that came to my mind, by using a computer to validate hypothesis. But many thanks for the pointers & suggestions, though! I was thinking about rebuilding this to make it realtime+interactive so that more than on…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi, author here. First, it's she, not he. Second, because I hadn't heard about that obvious test at all back then. I never pretended to do a superserious scientific analysis but rather answer to the questions that came to my mind, by using a computer to validate hypothesis. But many thanks for the pointers & suggestions, though! I was thinking about rebuilding this to make it realtime+interactive so that more than on…
Hi author, I really liked the visualisations, especially the black hole thing. I think I may have misunderstood the purpose of your article: I first read it as a serious attempt to use textual analysis to do a comparison of the comprehensibility of Tolkein's best-known works, in which case you fell way short of the mark by going no further than word counting. I think it started off like that, but on re-reading it I s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi, author here. First, it's she, not he. Second, because I hadn't heard about that obvious test at all back then. I never pretended to do a superserious scientific analysis but rather answer to the questions that came to my mind, by using a computer to validate hypothesis. But many thanks for the pointers & suggestions, though! I was thinking about rebuilding this to make it realtime+interactive so that more than on…
The "originality" index bothered me, because as the work of a length grows, you'd generically expect less words to be introduced -- exactly what the results show. The idea makes sense, but I'm unclear on how to actually measure it in a way that's normalized by page count.
Why does everyone find the Silmarillion hard to read? Am I the only one, who had no problems with that style?
I suspect that the author may have had more luck explaining the difficulty of the Silmarillion if he had compared the number of unique proper nouns. I enjoyed it, but ISTR when I read it (over 30 years ago now) that it did have the feel of a telephone directory.
rather: Wasting time and attention on useless statistics and pointless visualizations.
Still, I have mixed feelings regarding your comment. Firstly, the author shows a true hacker spirit by trying to use the computer to solve problems, on the other hand, the author shows great courage to publish his/her thoughts on the Internet.
I do not want to live in a world where people are afraid of publishing their research (as insignificant as it might be) because of other people calling it "a waste of time" or "useless and pointless".