Software for Writers and Researchers about Zorbasoft
 
Plato Is No Longer Available
Plato is no longer in production. The documentation will remain on this site and email support will continue to be available to existing users. Thanks to all who've found it useful over the years.
 
Software for Writers and Researchers
Articles, papers, essays, book chapters, poems, and newspaper copy are linear forms that are read start to finish. But "start to finish" rarely describes the way they are written. An author may start with jottings, notes, lists, outlines, and a host of references to source material which may include names, books, articles, interviews, and any number of other things. As work progresses, an all too familiar juggling act ensues where all this preliminary material is slowly tranformed into narrative, and the narrative is organized into articles, chapters and finally even into books. If the end product is for scholarly readership, the references to source materal may need to be preserved in the form of footnotes, endnotes, and bibliographies.

The human mind is supremely adept at keeping track of these sorts of things and imposing order on them. But memory is fickle and details are sometimes forgotten. What's worse, the mind sometimes "locks into" the patterns it percieves and fails to see new patterns that may emerge from subsequent research.

The needs of writing and research go far beyond your typical word processing software, yet to marshall software to assist in all the areas of research and writing may end up taking more time than the research and writing itself, and be very frustrating to boot. This is where Zorbasoft come in.
 
Plato
Plato is a tool for managing masses of diverse information and turning it into any end product you need. Plato is designed for researchers and has been developed for complete flexibility. You can adapt it to completely different projects without substantial reconfiguration (as would be the case, for instance, with a relational database).

Plato takes diverse pieces of data, assists you in mapping their relationships and reordering them into meaningful output.
 
 
Mince
Mince is a tool that takes a given text (article, book, story, or any written form in plain text format) and dices it up by character, word, sentence, and paragraph. It then maps the following relationships:

  • character to containing word
  • word to adjacent word
  • word to containing sentence
  • sentence to adjacent sentence
  • sentence to containing paragraph
  • paragraph to adjacent paragraph


  • These mapped relationships allow you to analyze alomst any sort of word or phrase relationship, analyze how concepts relate to word patterns and frequencies, and find "needles in haystacks" of complex texts. Mince will also create dot maps of word connections for export and further analysis in network mapping tools such as Gephi, Cytoscope, Pajek, or Network Workbench.
     
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    All material copyright 2018 by Edward W. Farrell
    this page last updated on 2018.12.17