Latinitas Recens is now part of Numen

The Latinitas Recens (a dictionary of modern Latin words) is now part of Numen's core dictionary. You should be able to select it as a source in the source box (bottom right hand corner of the full site). Some interesting features of the Latinitas Recens do not currently work as well as planned, for instance expressions. Expressions (compound terms) are a new feature of Numen that will be incorporated eventually. They will show up when you search on them orbrowse for them. However, expressions will not produce paradigms nor will they be accessible through the word study tool.

Please let me know if you find any egregious errors! I'm sure there will be a few of the normal misspellings that need correction, and no doubt a few words will be in the wrong place.

Upcoming Server Move

Within the next week, Numen's physical server will be moving to a new location -- hopefully with a connection about 6 times faster than it's been over the last 10 months. Of course, it's not been exactly slow! But I just wanted to get the word out there because the site might be down for a day or two. With any luck, I can minimize that time and also make it happen on a slow day (historically, Saturdays are the slowest days). I apologize for the inconvenience.

Server Hardware Failure

Hi, Numen users. I really apologize, even more profusely than last time. It turns out that the "power failure" was a little bit more severe than I first believed. It turns out that the motherboard in the server failed. Not to worry - I've replaced all the dead machinery with working parts and it appears that most of the features of the site are up and running. I'll be restoring other services as I find out about them -- but if you happen to see something not working, please let me know right away! Thanks!

Power Failure

My apologies! There was a power failure and I didn't know the server was down. :( But it's back up now!

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.

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.

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!