whitneyt's blog

John Unsworth gave a talk at Harvard tonight teasingly titled "How Not to Read a Million Books: Text Mining, and Reading the Unreadable." He spoke mostly about the MONK project, a Mellon-funded collaboration that's familiar, I'm sure, to many HASTACers. MONK applies text mining techniques and visualizations to discover new dimensions to literary and historical texts.

From 1680 to 1793, the Comédie-Française, a French theatre troupe founded by Louis XIV, kept meticulous records for each of its performances. At the end of every show, the troupe’s secretary wrote down the cost of tickets, the total sales for each section of the theater, even how much was spent on wine for the rehearsal dinner. In a sense, these registers -- each one recorded on a preprinted one-page form -- acted like a proto-database, collecting metadata for every play ever performed by the Comédie-Française.