In the following video, Aditi Muralidharan (@silverasm), a Ph.D. student at UC-Berkeley, explains the core problem that catalyzes her research: We need tools that can help people have their ideas faster.
Or, as Muralidharan puts it: “Simply searching for it isn’t enough anymore.”
Toward that end, Muralidharan and her colleagues have developed WordSeer, a text analysis tool that examines and visualizes language use patterns.
Here’s how she describes the project:
WordSeer analyzes the grammatical structure of text. It makes it easier not only to ask the exact question that you meant to ask, but to get a sense for whether the results are representative and accurate — to kind of build intuition. We think that’s valuable. Tools like that should exist to help scientists and researchers do their jobs better.
Muralidharan goes into further detail in the full interview: