txtkit, Visual Text Mining Tool.

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29.04.04 txtkit, Visual Text Mining Tool.


The paths we ideally follow when we are reading a text, made of jumps, backtracks and interruptions, form a three-dimensional structure which describes the thought processes and their evolutions. Developed by the group Schoenerwissen, from Berlin, who also made Minitasking, ‘txtkit – Visual Text Mining Tool’, is a tool with a double interface, the txtshell, a command line interface, and the txtvbot, a software robot which visualizes the connections created in the texts read in real time by the user. The graphics it produces, therefore, is generated according to the user’s actions, statistical informations and a collaborative filtering scheme, which creates interconnected structures from the paths of different people. The more people access the same material, the more this scheme becomes complex, and the result is a sort of graphical wiki describing collective cognitive processes whose goal is to produce a more articulated interpretation of the fruition of digital contents. This tool uses sophisticated parsing algorithms and a Mysql database and is released under a Creative Commons license. It runs under Mac OS X 10.3.