TextMap - Part 1
I'm surprised I did not hear about TextMap, the entity Search Engine, earlier. According to the marketing text, TextMap is a search engine for entities - namely important (and not so important) people, places, and things in the news. TextMap news analysis system automatically identifies and monitors these entities, and identifies meaningful relationships between them.
There's a good post about TextMap's capabilities at ResourceShelf.
But how good is it? I tried using TextMap but can't say I felt there was anything that I could use as direct information. I tried a political figure - Hillary Rodham Clinton, just to get a full readout (since many of the other candidates don't have all the information processed that TextMap can provide).
First I get a bunch of articles and a map:
| Articles Referencing Hillary Rodham Clinton [More Articles] (What is this?) |
| Title | Date | Source | Snippet |
| Underdog Biden banks on Iraq plan | 05/25/07 | Fort Wayne News Sentinel | Biden is a 34-year veteran of the Senate, chairman of the Senate… |
| Richardson opposes immigration bill | 05/25/07 | Fort Wayne News Sentinel | Marsha Blackburn, who served as a senior adviser to the Mitt… |
| Edwards offers plan for vets, troops | 05/25/07 | Boston Globe | Marsha Blackburn, who served as a senior adviser to the Mitt… |
| Lawmakers predict shift in Iraq policy | 05/25/07 | Boston Globe | The most critical votes on the war are likely to be cast in… |
| Capitol connection | 05/25/07 | The State | There are
|
| Obama, Clinton side with anti-war Democrats | 05/25/07 | Boston Globe | Republican presidential contenders John McCain and Mitt Romney… |
| Clinton Revisits Health Care and Affordability - New… | 05/25/07 | New York Times | Her address came as her main opponent in the Democratic field,… |
I don't actually understand this map as well as I'd like to - nor do I understand what to do with the information - maybe that's the problem for me.
And yet, if we compare the TextMap of Clinton with Barack Obama we get something much stronger, more direct in h is map than hers - and that's all based on semantic analysis of text in the news media that may, in itself, not be that accurate - but that's what we have to work with and that's what TextMap is using - along with the other online sources that were cited:
It's all very interesting - and I'll get into that more in my next post, tomorrow.
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