Briefs

Oct 27, 2004. CCNmag.com reports that John Unsworth, dean of Illinois' Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) will lead a project on "Web-based Text-Mining and Visualization for Humanities Digital Libraries," Unsworth expects to produce software "for discovering, visualizing and exploring significant patterns across large collections of full-text humanities resources in digital libraries and collections."

...

For example, in the planning grant for this project, members of his research team, using the full set of Shakespeare's plays, selected five "circulation-of characters" features � scenes, nodes, singles, loops, switches � as independent variables, and "genre" as the dependent variable; they then "attempted to order the plays by feature similarities and see how that corresponded � or didn't � to genre," he said.

"There was one very interesting result, which was that Othello fell squarely in with the comedies. If I were to analyze this result, I'd ask a number of questions about the methods used to produce the results, but once satisfied that I was not looking at an artifact of the procedure itself, I would ask what it means that Othello has the structural features of comedy, and from there, an interesting journal article might emerge."

Here is the rest of the story.