Comments on: Comparing weblog text to the PhD dissertation via tagclouds http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2008/07/07/comparing-weblog-text-to-phd-dissertation/ Lilia Efimova on personal productivity in knowledge-intensive environments, weblog research, knowledge management, PhD, serendipity and lack of work-life balance... Fri, 13 Jan 2012 16:17:46 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.5 By: Tag clouds on the move « Making CommunitySense http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2008/07/07/comparing-weblog-text-to-phd-dissertation/comment-page-1/#comment-1241 Tag clouds on the move « Making CommunitySense Sun, 03 Aug 2008 19:07:18 +0000 http://blog.mathemagenic.com/?p=1516#comment-1241 [...] cloud for various purposes, but to compare tag clouds.  Lilia Efimova gives a nice example of how she compared the tag clouds of her blog posts and a dissertation chapter on the same topic. Another comparison is to see how different tag cloud tools process the same text. Here’s the [...] [...] cloud for various purposes, but to compare tag clouds.  Lilia Efimova gives a nice example of how she compared the tag clouds of her blog posts and a dissertation chapter on the same topic. Another comparison is to see how different tag cloud tools process the same text. Here’s the [...]

]]> By: Lilia Efimova http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2008/07/07/comparing-weblog-text-to-phd-dissertation/comment-page-1/#comment-309 Lilia Efimova Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:27:25 +0000 http://blog.mathemagenic.com/?p=1516#comment-309 It's interesting how a tag cloud represents something about the text in the spaces between words, isn't it? :) It’s interesting how a tag cloud represents something about the text in the spaces between words, isn’t it? :)

]]> By: Jason Priem http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2008/07/07/comparing-weblog-text-to-phd-dissertation/comment-page-1/#comment-300 Jason Priem Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:51:30 +0000 http://blog.mathemagenic.com/?p=1516#comment-300 Entirely awesome idea! There plenty of algorithms out there that attempt to determine the similarity between two documents (Plagiarism detection is one application among many; <a href="http://turnitin.com/" rel="nofollow">turnitin</a> is an example of this). The tricky thing is that "similarity" is a pretty slippery concept. Getting raters to read both documents would be the gold standard, but it's really slow. Machine comparison is fast, but it's hard to get the algorithm perfect. It would be interesting to do a three-way test: readers who read both documents, readers who read just tag clouds, and one or more programs. I think that your tag cloud method may be a good happy medium between quick-but-dumb machine comparisons and smart-but-slow human-reading. You still get access to those oh-so-human-gestalts of the documents, but visualization saves you a load of time. Entirely awesome idea! There plenty of algorithms out there that attempt to determine the similarity between two documents (Plagiarism detection is one application among many; turnitin is an example of this). The tricky thing is that “similarity” is a pretty slippery concept. Getting raters to read both documents would be the gold standard, but it’s really slow. Machine comparison is fast, but it’s hard to get the algorithm perfect.

It would be interesting to do a three-way test: readers who read both documents, readers who read just tag clouds, and one or more programs. I think that your tag cloud method may be a good happy medium between quick-but-dumb machine comparisons and smart-but-slow human-reading. You still get access to those oh-so-human-gestalts of the documents, but visualization saves you a load of time.

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