gatewatching

Good news! Our University has purchased a site license for Leximancer, and we’ll be making extensive use of it in our research on the Australian blogosphere.

The blurb from the website gives a pretty neat summary of what Leximancer does:

Leximancer is a software tool that enables users to find meaning from text-based documents. It automatically identifies key themes, concepts and ideas from unstructured text with little or no guidance. The innovative concept map allows users to interact with the analysis – navigating the true meaning of the text.

Of course, there are other ways to find “meaning” in text, but the application for it in studying the blogosphere is in finding out whether particular bloggers have concepts or themes that they return to over time, and whether that’s matched by the comments threads.

I imagine bloggers themselves might be interested in seeing the results of this kind of analysis of their blogs - we might issue a call for dump files soon when we’re more expert users.

Leximancer itself is an interesting example of research commercialisation - it began its life over at UQ as applied IT research, and now its a commercial venture.

Anyway, its bound to be a fun toy to play with - the first thing we’ll do is analyse our own project, youdecide2007, to see which concepts and themes recur most frequently.