I looked at W. Bradford Paley's page- he is the author of TextArc and he calls it his "gentle obsession" although he credits others for supporting his project in important ways--with the java code, with the graphical cacheing, with the archive to work with, and the bandwidth to host his display. It was very interesting to look around within the TextArc site and to try its various permutations. I agree with Meg that it makes me feel a bit underpowered; my brain doesn't have enough wattage to see what this is really good for. (Yet?) Although every time I encounter one of these "texts" that use the affordances of linked computing in innovative ways I feel my mind stretch just a bit more. Coming from a text-based literacy as I do, these discursive objects that morph and change are a bit strange. (I decided to look at "Alice" because that already inhabits a bent realm. Funny, the TextArc treatment made Carroll's drug trip of a story seem "normal" because all the examples undergo a uniform semantic fractalization.)
This is from Paley's bio-page which offers a link to a really interesting visual representation of scientific paradigms and where/how they overlap and intersect: "Map of science collaboration:
opens pictorial feature in the journal Nature
Katy Borner's Places & Spaces exhibition (currently at the New York Hall of Science commissioned an “illuminated diagram” presentation of how different paradigms of science interact and where in the world science gets done. The work was a collaboration between Kevin Boyack, John Burgoon, Peter Kennard, Dick Klavans, and myself. One of the two images in that display (Kevin's Dick's and my own) was chosen to open the journal Nature's annual pictorial review as a two-page spread. Follow this link to read a short discussion of the image and related work. " Paley has very broad interests that link together through this visual/mental mapping technique.
The Gender Genie coded all my writing samples as "male" (about 10 separate pieces), but all were theory related academic essays-- even my long papers about females, such as Helene Cixsous and Katherine Hayles. When I submitted one paragraph from the Helene Cixsous text it did code "female" but that particular snippet a quoted her prose. When I (on-purpose) wrote something to be first person and descriptive it did finally code "female". Just goes to show you, assuming the algorithm makes a valid-ish frame-- nothing is perfect; nothing neutral, or ideology-free-- that academia priviledges the male persona as authentic, and so-called "female" writing is other-than. At least I can convincingly impersonate a male when I write for school, which must mean I am learning something.