The Corpus of American Historical English is a searchable index of word usage in American printed material from 1810 to 2009. Powerful complex searches allow you to trace the appearance and evolution of words and phrases and even specific grammatical constructions, see trends in frequency, and plenty more. Start with the
5-Minute Tour.
posted by Miko
on Jan 7, 2012 -
23 comments
Mining the Mother of all Data Dumps We now have a relatively massive haul of digital data from the OBL strike. There are several forensic toolkits in use by the private
(commercially available) and
public sector as well as
open-source.
Best practices include inventorying all the sources, cloning the sources so as to not damage pristine data, recovering any partial or damaged content, making the cloned sources read-only, adhering to legally-admissible tools standards, and documenting everything. There is an excellent source titled Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content from the Council on Library and Information Resources [
pdf,
Resource Shelf]. But what to do next*?
[more inside]
posted by rzklkng
on May 4, 2011 -
40 comments
Postcards From Hell — For the last half-decade, the
Fund for Peace, working with Foreign Policy, has been putting together the
Failed States Index (the 2010 version is out), using a battery of indicators to determine how stable—or unstable—a country is. But as the photos here demonstrate, sometimes the best test is the simplest one: You'll only know a failed state when you see it.
[more inside]
posted by netbros
on Jun 25, 2010 -
16 comments
Dave Chalmers has just launched
PhilPapers, a directory of nearly 200,000 online papers in philosophy. This is a jawdropping and amazing resource for philosophical research. For evidence of the scope of this project and the care that has been given to it, see the
taxonomy of philosophy that was developed for the site.
posted by painquale
on Jan 28, 2009 -
28 comments
In the First Person "is a free, high quality, professionally published, in-depth index of close to 4,000 collections of personal narratives in English from around the world. It lets you keyword search more than 700,000 pages of full-text by more than 18,000 individuals from all walks of life. It also contains pointers to some 4,300 audio and video files and 30,000 bibliographic records."
(Description from website.) You can also browse by
repository,
collection,
subject and several other ways.
posted by cog_nate
on Aug 7, 2008 -
9 comments
This one's for all the editors out there! Remember when index cards were actually used to create...
indexes?
posted by scody
on Dec 20, 2007 -
21 comments
The
UBS Bank calculated
how long it takes an average worker around the world to earn enough to buy a Big Mac. Workers in Tokyo were the fastest:
Tokyo 10 minutes,
New York 13 minutes,
London 16 minutes,
Hong Kong 17 minutes,
Paris 21 minutes,
Moscow 25 minutes,
Rome 39 minutes,
Beijing 44 minutes,
Manila 81 minutes,
Jakarta 86 minutes.
Is this a fair comparison? Is it something that will change people's perspective about the rest of the world?
posted by PetBoogaloo
on Nov 17, 2006 -
53 comments
Pssst! Wanna Buy A Reliable, Second-Hand Car? You could do worse than start with
Honest John, a plain-speaking, fiercely independent Cockney motor car wonk who'll see you right, no problem. If you're obsessive about reliability, i.e. don't have the time or inclination to look after your wheels and just want the damn thing to get you from A to B and back again, check out the often surprising
Reliability Index for the
most and
least trustworthy automobiles. [
Eurocentric warning! Btw, what are the most reliable independent car guides - preferably free and online - in the U.S, Canada, etc?]
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Nov 20, 2003 -
32 comments
Look at your hands. Is your index finger shorter or longer than your ring finger? Be careful because according to
John T. Manning, those two fingers reveal a variety of characteristics about yourself to the world including assertiveness, attractiveness, reproductive success, hand preference, verbal fluency, autism, depression, health and disease,
homosexuality tendancies, musical and sports aptitudes. [via
Tigerbunny]
And while you are at it don't forget what the
middle finger and
a long second toe might reveal.
posted by oh posey
on Oct 11, 2002 -
37 comments
The Rapture Index This rather bizarre site is the Dow Jones of the end of the world. From the site, "You could say the Rapture index is a Dow Jones Industrial Average of end time activity, but I think it would be better if you viewed it as prophetic speedometer. The higher the number, the faster we're moving towards the occurrence of pre-tribulation rapture. "
Whacked...
posted by Coop
on Sep 20, 2002 -
23 comments
Search-indexing video footage? Dremedia's software can analyze video footage -- either raw or edited -- and not only identify nearly every word spoken but also differentiate between speakers and even understand when a scene changes. And who said the gee-whiz startup was dead? Well, it is, but
Futureboy still has rent to pay, I s'pose.
posted by scarabic
on Jan 4, 2002 -
4 comments
Another blog-tracking tool... Although I am braced for mefi attack for posting this one ("non-story - there are other web log trackers" etc, etc), I'm interested to hear what me-fier's think about the ultimate viability of such a product. Is a comprehensive weblog crawler a viable product? Would google-like algorithms work? What would this mean for said "memes" and their proliferation on the net? Further, is there a potential for a "commodification of the meme?" Would the corporates, in the style of
viral marketing gimmicks
("I Kiss you!"), use such a "meme tracker" to identify and exploit net culture
"hot spots?"
posted by preguicoso
on Jul 30, 2001 -
23 comments
Blogdex at media.mit.edu (The link may not work, I've gotten through twice now, both times between noon and 4pm PST, but every other time I've tried I've gotten server not available errors.)Does anyone know what this is? The times I got through it looked like an interesting cross tabulation of what is being covered in the web log world, like a handy index for people looking for entries on a certain topic. It was not complete looking when I got in last, the site mostly consisted of the front, and an "about" section, but the front page did have a list of the top ten links being talked about on currently indexed blogs. I found the link in my referer log.
posted by Nothing
on Jul 21, 2001 -
15 comments
The Rapture Index "by no means is meant to predict the rapture, however, the index is meant to measure the type of activity that could act as a precursor to the rapture." It tracks such data as unemployment, inflation, false Christs and, of course, plagues.
posted by philip
on Apr 10, 2000 -
0 comments
