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Numen - The Latin Lexicon - An Online Latin Dictionary

Friday, November 16, 2012

Word Clouds of Vergil's Aeneid, Book I


I was testing word-cloud-making software this morning.

Wordle
This one seems to get the gist of what’s going on pretty well. Here is the first book of the Aeneid. I left in the common words, but I can look at this word cloud and fairly easily get a sense of what’s going on. If I were writing an article about this book based on the word cloud, I think I’d be able to know fairly quickly what the main themes are. Aeneas, Dido, Venus, goddess, weapons, ships, Troy, Juno, queen, etc. This is the only word cloud software that understands Latin, by the way J


Tagxedo
This one is neat because you can make shapes. However, I don’t feel it’s really great with themes. It doesn’t put the most important words front and center. I think the way Wordle was doing it was giving Capitalized words a heavier weighting.  However, it’s got a *lot* of options for customizations. There is also a “pro” version which allows you to do more advanced editing and customization.




TagCrowd
This one is fairly plain and without many options. It really doesn’t give me a good sense of the book at all. It’s heuristic model seems to be “count words,” which seems logical at first, doesn’t really provide a sense of importance to many important words.


This one is fairly plain and without many options. It really doesn’t give me a good sense of the book at all. It’s heuristic model seems to be “count words,” which seems logical at first, doesn’t really provide a sense of importance to many important words.

Many Eyes
This one’s neat because it’s got hundreds of different options, which are actually somewhat overwhelming! You have to register/login to use it. ( For some reason, UC’s mail system put the registration email in my spam folder.) They have a lot of visualization tools, including word clouds, word trees, phrase networks, and social media connections. There are just not as many customization options as the first 2.






Thursday, November 8, 2012

Updates to the Word Study Tool and the Latinitas Recens

I was recently browsing through Google Analytics (a tool that measures traffic to this site) and noticed that the most popular page by far is the Word Study Tool. In light of that, I spent 30 minutes sprucing it up to make it look better. I hope you enjoy it. I would eventually like to add more keyboard shortcuts. Presently, the only keyboard shortcuts are the left arrow and the right arrow.

In other news, I also updated the template for the Latinitas Recens page. I'm working on incorporating that dictionary (as well as Whitaker's Words) as a new source. In the meantime, please enjoy the updated look.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Site Outage Yesterday

There was a site outage yesterday due to a power failure. The server was offline for most of the day. I truly apologize for that and for the inconvenience!

Thursday, September 6, 2012

Paradigms! Paradigms! Paradigms! (Verbs)

Good news! I made two changes to errata in the verb paradigms this week.

  1. Someone with a real eagle eye noticed that the ... ahem (this is a mouthful!) ... third person plural future passive imperative was listed in the space reserved for second person plural future passive imperative. Oh my! There is no second person plural future passive imperative! :) (New Latin Grammar, Page 72). 
  2. The verb paradigms for the fero class of verbs included an incorrectly formed gerund/gerundive (future passive participle). That is now fixed.
As usual, most of the corrections to this Lexicon go on daily. I usually correct between 5 and 10 errors per day. Thanks for all those eagle eyes out there spotting typos, errors, and database mistakes! 



Sunday, July 8, 2012

A Bug Fix for the Source Box

In the lower-right corner you should see a "source" box. Sometimes that source box disappears when users sign on. I tracked down that bug and squashed it! Hopefully it's working better for you, but if it's not, please let me know.

Friday, May 18, 2012

Friday, May 11, 2012

Server Software Upgrades


Today Numen got a bunch of upgrades to the latest versions including the database server Postgresql, the web server Apache, the server programming language PHP, and the JavaScript client library jQuery and the Javascript client library jQuery Mobile all got upgraded today. Things should run faster and a act a bit more stable.

If anything seems to be giving you a problem, please let me know in the comments!

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Down for almost three weeks...

The amount of frustration this "firewall" glitch has caused me is nothing compared to how badly I feel that the website was down for ... almost 3 weeks. It seemed like there was no end to the number of emails I sent to the IT department to get it back up and running, but in the end it took nothing less than several phone calls to the proper supervisors. To everyone who was inconvenienced by this downtime, I truly apologize. I made the mistake of assuming that a 2-minute setting change would take two minutes. Let my mistake be a lesson to anyone in the same position.

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

The Latin Lexicon Server is down until IT fixes the firewall...

I'm very sorry that the server is down at the moment. The university's IT department is dragging its feet on the firewall rules. We've put in a request for a rush! Hopefully it will come back online today. 

Friday, April 6, 2012

Server Move

The server has been physically moved and so the website was down for some period of time (hopefully not too long!)

Apologies for that!

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