
For a forthcoming article in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, here is a Computational Document Format (CDF) computation drawn from it for illustrative purposes. CDFs are like PDFs, which most of us are familiar with, and differ in that they allow for interactive functionality. To run a CDF, you need to do the following things:
(1) Download the free CDF viewer from Wolfram research
(2) Download my CDF file from here
(3) Open it up and run it.
CDFs aren’t perfect. They don’t allow Importing or Exporting data, or in the basic version, any computations. But if you pre-load the data you can at least get a sense of some of the issues I am discussing in my article.
As a quick update: I’ve been putting this concept to work on a viewer of the Hansard parliamentary record, to find and quickly close on closely related concepts.