The story of choosing an API - stumbling through a jungle of selection barriers
Summary: A user experience a selection barrier when he/she is faced with multiple choices for accomplishing a task but is unsure of which one to select [1]. I recently experienced this as I was beginning to do text analytics in MATLAB. In this blog, I document my trip through a land of many choices trying to figure out a single file reading function to use and how I wish the experience had gone better. Finally, I Text analytics is a hot topic these days. I came across John Laudun's Text Analytics 101 when browsing for an intro article. The article walked the reader through an example that involved revealing language usage patterns in a short story based on the frequency of words. A light bulb lit up in my head: why don't I do the same thing with my Toastmaster speeches? That would help me understand, quantitatively, what words I "rely on" the most and help me think about how I might vary my language to make my speeches more accurately express the meanings I int