Text Mining Interest

From this week's reading, I am most intrigued by the second link titled “Where to Start with Text Mining.” The foundation of this interest is, obviously, my personal connection. I am an English major with an emphasis in Literature and Creative Writing. Clearly, the idea of bringing hundreds, even thousands of texts together seems like a wonderful, highly useful dream-come-true.

I am familiar with JSTOR. I have used JSTOR only scarcely and usually only for research purposes. I see that the blogger is noticing a conflict in JSTOR with the errors involving text match up. I remember getting a lot of unrelated articles and information to my topic of research (back in the day, of course). The one main deterrent of anything is frustration. Nowadays if something isn’t fast, efficient, and easy to use… people will not spend their time trying to figure it out. I think this can be said for any database for literary works or works of any kind. If the database is not easily accessible, accurate, and efficient it will not be effective because many people will not take the time to learn to use it and be patient.

Because I have used such things in my own education experience, I can see the potential of this to become an even more valuable part of education in the future. In English classes we are always discussing translations, common themes, ties to other literary works… we continuously are drawing conclusions from several sources about historical events, scientific break through, and anything else that could have effected the style, rhetoric, plot, etc. of literary works. By continuing to build up resources like this, the gaps in education could be filled. Students would be able to see not only how certain literary works have changed over time and translation but  also how other parts of life such as history, and scientific findings during the times of these writings effected the work as a whole.