I was asked this morning to talk about the difference new technologies bring to research. This post provides an example of the sort of thing I was attempting to describe. "Using important texts such as the Bible, the Divine Comedy, and Shakespeare (First Folio), Reinhard’s widget brought these texts together with some of their more famous commentaries. A spike graph at the top of the screen showed viewers where the text had received more (or less) comment, and scrolling down into the text allowed viewers to see specific comments from a range of well known thinkers." Yes, you could have done this with a large table and a whole bunch of index cards, I suppose. But this sort of look at large bodies of data all at once - a 'macroscope' - can only be done electronically.
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