The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 17.0261 Monday, 3 April 2006
From: Martin Mueller <
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Date: Saturday, 1 Apr 2006 11:04:12 -0600
Subject: Northwestern University Announces Release of WordHoard
Academic Technologies and the Library at Northwestern University are
happy to announce the release of WordHoard at
http:wordhoard.northwestern.edu.
Named after an Old English phrase for the verbal treasure unlocked by a
wise speaker, WordHoard is an application for the close reading and
scholarly analysis of deeply tagged literary texts. It applies to highly
canonical literary texts the insights and techniques of corpus
linguistics, that is to say, the empirical and computer-assisted study
of large bodies of written texts or transcribed speech. In the WordHoard
environment, such texts are tagged by morphological, lexical, prosodic,
and narratological criteria. They are mediated through a digital page or
user interface that lets scholarly but non-technical users explore the
greatly increased query potential of textual data kept in such a form.
The development of WordHoard has been supported by a generous grant from
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The current release includes the
remains of Early Greek epic in Greek and translation, all of Chaucer and
Shakespeare, and Spenser's Faerie Queene. The texts have been tagged by
morphosyntactic, lexical, prosodic, and narratological criteria. The
English texts have been tagged according to a common scheme that enables
users to compare Chaucer with Spenser or Shakespeare from a variety of
perspectives.
WordHoard may be seen as a textbase with an unusually flexible set of
concordance features. Much attention has been paid to a user interface
that allows for the side-by-display of arbitrarily chosen passages in
the same field of vision. Concordance searches may quickly be grouped
and regrouped by various criteria, including speaker gender or prosodic
status in the case of Shakespeare.
Every word occurrence in the texts is a link that can be activated to
display in a GetInfo window all the information the text may be said to
know about all forms of the word in that location. This is very useful
for texts that have much orthographic or morphological variety, such as
Spenser or Chaucer, not to speak of Homer or Hesiod: for any given word
in the text the reader is a second away from a table that shows all the
spellings of all the forms of that word sorted by frequency, thus giving
an immediate overview of actual usage.
WordHoard includes a statistical engine that supports a variety of
procedures common in Natural Language Processing. For example, users can
look for words that are disproportionately common or rare in
Shakespeare's comedies when compared with the tragedies or all of
Shakespeare. The current release includes precompiled work sets for
analysis. In later releases, users will be able to configure sets for
their own purposes.
WordHoard also includes an annotation module. In the current release,
this module supports the display of the Iliad scholia as true textual
marginalia. Later releases will support user annotation not only of
particular locations in a text but of words wherever they occur. A
prototype of WordHoard with user generated annotation is in operation at
Northwestern, but it will require additional security feature before it
can be released.
WordHoard is a Java Web Start/Swing application. It requires a
broadband connection and will not work over a modem. Many operations in
WordHoard involve extensive shuttling between the client and the server.
WordHoard will therefore generally be quite a bit faster in on-campus
environments, where information moves at the same speed in both
directions, than in off-campus environments where download speeds are
between five and times as fast as upload speeds. General network traffic
and the complexity of queries or size of result sets also are important
variables. We will be very interested in getting feedback from users
about how the application works in different environments. WordHoard has
a Send Error Report in its File Menu. This was designed to point out
errors in the tagging, but it can be used just as effectively for
general comments. You may also send email to
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_______________________________________________________________
S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List
Hardy M. Cook,
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The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net>
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opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the
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