A very impressive resource for mapping data against a common geographic background.
Works for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the amount of effort that has gone into the site and its tools.
But, I think having a common frame of reference, that is geographic locations, simplifies the problem addressed by topic maps.
That is the data is seen through the common lens of geographic boundaries and/or locations.
To make it closer to the problem faced by topic maps, what if geographic locations had to be brought into focus, before data could be mapped against them?
That seems to me to be the harder problem.
I have wondered whether we could leverage the algorithms and data structures developed for geography if we treated text as a geographical data object. What features of a literary text could be treated as geographical features?
Comment by CapnKirk — February 2, 2011 @ 11:31 am
Interesting question!
Well, do you mean the text as a string of tokens or the text as say the result of statistical analysis?
Or the text as the result of syntactic analysis, where, of course, we would have to chose the units and any mapping to say elevation. (same questions happen with statistical analysis.
Oh, just for grins, what if we turned every word on its “head” so to speak and used its length as a basis for elevation? So we could experiment with how to create boundaries on the map and manipulating its contents.
Suspect a lot of this would be pure research in the sense we keep careful records and simply try things to see if they give us greater insight or understanding of the text. Or at least appear to do so.
Another suggestion, what if we used the number of “senses” for any term in a dictionary as its “height” for an elevation? Not the sense with which it is used but the number of senses someone decided that it had. That could be interesting.
Will be on the lookout for tools that facilitate that sort of investigation.
Comment by Patrick Durusau — February 4, 2011 @ 3:52 am