[Sigia-l] Tag clouds and lexical analysis

[Will Parker]

The tech reporting crew at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (joint  
company newsletter of Microsoft and Boeing) have finally made  
themselves useful by giving us a bit of info-fluff (their usual job)  
while referencing some tools that may help people experimenting with  
tag clouds.

	> Bill Gates and Steve Jobs: Keynote text analysis

		http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/110473.asp

It's a fun read (and don't miss the comment wars). However, the  
important bit is that the article also points to a useful PHP-based  
tag-cloud generation tool creating by Chirag Mehta, who also offers  
other useful code outside the scope of this thread. Tagline Generator  
is free and licensed under Creative Commons 'Attribution' restrictions.

	> Tagline Generator - Timeline-based Tag Clouds

		http://chir.ag/tech/download/tagline/

As the title promises, it offers a means of generating tag timelines,  
showing how the cloud changes over time.

Other useful tools referenced in the article or in articles linked to  
the original, but not directly related to this thread:

	> English-language text analysis tools. (Unfortunately, no  
immediately obvious method of
	   accessing these tools via web services.)

		 UsingEnglish.com/resources/text-statistics.php

	> English-language word-stemming (Porter Stemming) code to remove  
common word
	endings from input words (e.g., {"using", "used"} -> "us").
	(Available in more computer languages than really necessary.)
	
		http://www.tartarus.org/~martin/PorterStemmer/
		
	A lightweight AJAXish slider control:

		http://webfx.eae.net/dhtml/slider/slider.html

- Will
Will Parker
wparker at ChannelingDesign.com

"The only people who value your specialist knowledge are the ones who  
already have it." - William Tozier