Re: Things to do with text

On Nov 11, 2007 3:17 PM, John Hudson <[email protected]> wrote:
> Some
> of these things are obvious in a general sense (spelling and grammar checking, sorting,
> comparing), but I'd like to come up with some specific and interesting examples --
> particularly of a scholarly nature --,

For a more specific example: Google Books has implemented a Popular
Passages tab on the page for the books. This lets you trace passages
that have been used and reused in various works. An example given by
their blog post linked below is that some significant part of "...a
text that is henceforth no longer a finished corpus of writing, some
content enclosed in a book or its margins, but a differential network,
a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself,
to other differential traces. Thus the text overruns all the limits
assigned to it so far..." shows up in some 40 books. This type of
analysis would be impossible without computerized text.

* http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2007/09/dive-into-meme-pool-with-google-book.html