Welcome to the TextMap Blog!

Hello World!   This is the first posting of a blog on developments revolving around the Lydia / TextMap news and blog analysis project at Stony Brook University.    These will include:

• Descriptions of newly available functionality on the TextMap website
• Interesting little discoveries on how the world works, derived from TextMap Access data.
• Reports on social science research based on TextMap analysis
• Publication announcements of Lydia-oriented research out of our lab.
• Developments at General Sentiment LLC, a startup company based on Lydia technology.

The time is right to start this blog, because a lot is now happening in the Lydia/TextMap world. Several interesting new analysis depositories (including a longer and more comprehensive newspaper corpus, PubMed abstracts, patents, and Supreme Court decisions) have just come on line as our infrastructure matures.  Our TextMap Access interface now provides instant access to this vast amount of data and analysis.   I am now spending (wasting?) substantial amounts of time playing with our data, so this blog is the perfect place to relate my discoveries.

Substantial collaborations relying on our analysis have already begun with political scientists, sociologists, and historians, but this is hopefully just the start of several beautiful friendships. Thanks for coming on board.  I look forward to having reading (and making) news together.