Words | Michele Pasin

2012

blog Wittgenstein Tractatus and the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit

Jul 2012

What do the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit and the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein have in common? Definitely not much, at first sight. But the moment you realize that Wittgenstein was so fascinated with logic that he wanted to organize his masterwork in the form of a tree structure, you may change your mind.

blog Crowdsourcing interpretation with Prism, a new software from the Scholar's Lab

Jun 2012

Prism is a new online tool by the Scholars' Lab at the University of Virginia. In a nutshell, Prism lets users independently highlight and annotate passages from a text, then mashes up all of these highlights into a new version of the text where the 'importance' of certain passages is rendered graphically via colors and font sizes.

2011

blog Seminar: Tagore digital editions and Bengali textual computing

Oct 2011

Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri gave a very interesting talk yesterday on the scope, methods, and aims of 'Bichitra' (literally, 'the various'), the ongoing project for an online variorum edition of the complete works of Rabindranath Tagore in English and Bengali. The talk (part of this year's DDH research seminar) highlighted a number of issues I wasn't very familiar with, so in this post I'm summarizing them and then offering a couple of possible suggestions.

blog Luc Steels on creating artificial semiotic systems

Sep 2011

In this post, I'm presenting an organized version of the notes I've taken after reading a beautiful paper by Luc Steels titled "The Symbol Grounding Problem has been solved. So What's Next?"

blog Python links (and more) 7/2/11

Feb 2011

This post contains a collection of various interesting things I've encountered over the last couple of weeks. They're organized into three categories: Python-related links, events and conferences, and new online tools. I hope you'll find something of interest!

2009

blog NLP for Classical Studies

Jul 2009

If you're into humanities computing and NLP, you might want to check out the eAqua project. eAqua stands for 'Extraction of structured knowledge from ancient sources', and it's a project that combines various text mining techniques to extract information for ancient texts.

blog Python web-parsing libraries

Jul 2009

While continuing the interminable search for the ideal python editor, I run into three really useful libraries for scraping information off webpages:

blog WordSift: visualize text

Jun 2009

WordSift [http://www.wordsift.com/] is a tool that was created primarily for teachers. Mainly, think of it playfully - as a toy in a linguistic playground that is available to instantly capture and display the vocabulary structure of texts, and to help **create an opportunity to talk and play with language.

2006

blog The Nora Project

Nov 2006

The Nora Project aims at putting together a big pool of digital texts in the humanities in order to develop and test data mining techniques specific to this domain. Various collaborations with other institutions have provided them already a testbed of about 10,000 literary texts in English, from the 19th century, or about 5 GB of marked-up text.

blog A doctor hidden in your mac

Mar 2006

What a treat to find a hidden AI gem in your computer. As it turns out, OS X comes with the simulated therapy program, Eliza, pre-installed. Eliza was written at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum between 1964 to 1966, and it was one of the early examples of natural language processing.