SDH/SEMI Panel: Explorations in a Variety of Interfaces for the Reading of a Database

A Textual Database of Dreams and the New
Context of Reading
Christian Vandendorpe (Département de letters françaises,
Université d’Ottawa)
The advent of the web has fostered the development of
specialised textual databases, dedicated to tabular collections
of snippets of our literary heritage. Their purpose is to facilitate
the study of a particular phenomenon through the centuries.
Henceforth, the act of reading tends to adopt a tabular way of
reading as the one advocated by Claude Levy Strauss for the
study of myths. In order to focus on a specific case, we shall
examine the textual mysql database <http://www.reves
.ca>, a collection of some fifteen hundred dream narratives
from various cultures since Homer and the Bible, and discuss
its goals and its initial interface. The challenge is to design an
interface that would be both efficient and exciting, inducing in
the reader the desire of reading and helping him or her to
explore the database and to make meaningful relations between
the data. The Mandala as an Interface to a Textual
Database
Stan Ruecker (University of Alberta) and Stéfan Sinclair
(McMaster University)
The Mandala is a Java-xml application that makes visible the
relations between sets of data. Its playful interface is designed
to elicit a meaningful reading activity by the user in order to
facilitate an in-depth exploration of the contents. We shall
examine how it works with <http://www.reves.ca>, its
potential and its pertinence in the new context of reading.
Towards More Powerful Semantic Interfaces
Dominic Forest (École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de
l'information, Université de Montréal)
In this presentation, I will discuss the preliminary results of a
research initiative where we explored the relevance of applying
text mining techniques on a literary corpus. The corpus used
in this work is composed of short thematically-related literary
texts stored in a database. The main objective of this project is
twofold. First, we want to explore if traditional text mining
techniques can successfully be used to assist the extraction and
analysis of relevant information found in literary texts.
Secondly, we also want to explore if computer-assisted text
analysis tools and text mining techniques can be useful to help
access to valuable literary information stored in a textual
database. This talk will be divided in three main parts. First, I
will present the fundamental text mining concepts and
techniques. In the second part, I will describe the
computer-assisted text analysis processes that were applied on
the online textual database (<http://www.reves.ca>).
Finally, I will discuss some of the results we obtained and give
an overview of the future work that will be done in this project.