113 research outputs found
Imagery Lenses for Visualizing Text Corpora
In this focused study, we will observe how poetry scholars (domain experts) examine small corpora and formulate new hypotheses with and without corpus visualization tools. We will verify the new hypotheses through human analysis, which in general is more
reliable than computational verification
Visual Text Analysis in Digital Humanities
In 2005, Franco Moretti introduced Distant Reading to analyse entire literary text collections. This was a rather revolutionary idea compared to the traditional Close Reading, which focuses on the thorough interpretation of an individual work. Both reading techniques are the prior means of Visual Text Analysis. We present an overview of the research conducted since 2005 on supporting text analysis tasks with close and distant reading visualizations in the digital humanities. Therefore, we classify the observed papers according to a taxonomy of text analysis tasks, categorize applied close and distant reading techniques to support the investigation of these tasks and illustrate approaches that combine both reading techniques in order to provide a multi-faceted view of the textual data. In addition, we take a look at the used text sources and at the typical data transformation steps required for the proposed visualizations. Finally, we summarize collaboration experiences when developing visualizations for close and distant reading, and we give an outlook on future challenges in that research area
Text in Visualization: Extending the Visualization Design Space
This thesis is a systematic exploration and expansion of the design space of data visualization specifically with regards to text. A critical analysis of text in data visualizations reveals gaps in existing frameworks and the use of text in practice. A cross-disciplinary review across fields such as typography, cartography and technical applications yields typographic techniques to encode data into text and provides the scope for the expanded design space. Mapping new attributes, techniques and considerations back to well understood visualization principles organizes the design space of text in visualization. This design space includes: 1) text as a primary data type literally encoded into alphanumeric glyphs, 2) typographic attributes, such as bold and italic, capable of encoding additional data onto literal text, 3) scope of mark, ranging from individual glyphs, syllables and words; to sentences, paragraphs and documents, and 4) layout of these text elements applicable most known visualization techniques and text specific techniques such as tables. This is the primary contribution of this thesis (Part A and B).
Then, this design space is used to facilitate the design, implementation and evaluation of new types of visualization techniques, ranging from enhancements of existing techniques, such as, extending scatterplots and graphs with literal marks, stem & leaf plots with multivariate glyphs and broader scope, and microtext line charts; to new visualization techniques, such as, multivariate typographic thematic maps; text formatted to facilitate skimming; and proportionally encoding quantitative values in running text – all of which are new contributions to the field (Part C). Finally, a broad evaluation across the framework and the sample visualizations with cross-discipline expert critiques and a metrics based approach reveals some concerns and many opportunities pointing towards a breadth of future research work now possible with this new framework. (Part D and E)
Visualizing Historical Book Trade Data: An Iterative Design Study with Close Collaboration with Domain Experts
The circulation of historical books has always been an area of interest for
historians. However, the data used to represent the journey of a book across
different places and times can be difficult for domain experts to digest due to
buried geographical and chronological features within text-based presentations.
This situation provides an opportunity for collaboration between visualization
researchers and historians. This paper describes a design study where a variant
of the Nine-Stage Framework was employed to develop a Visual Analytics (VA)
tool called DanteExploreVis. This tool was designed to aid domain experts in
exploring, explaining, and presenting book trade data from multiple
perspectives. We discuss the design choices made and how each panel in the
interface meets the domain requirements. We also present the results of a
qualitative evaluation conducted with domain experts. The main contributions of
this paper include: 1) the development of a VA tool to support domain experts
in exploring, explaining, and presenting book trade data; 2) a comprehensive
documentation of the iterative design, development, and evaluation process
following the variant Nine-Stage Framework; 3) a summary of the insights gained
and lessons learned from this design study in the context of the humanities
field; and 4) reflections on how our approach could be applied in a more
generalizable way
Close and Distant Reading Visualizations for the Comparative Analysis of Digital Humanities Data
Traditionally, humanities scholars carrying out research on a specific or on multiple literary work(s) are interested in the analysis of related texts or text passages. But the digital age has opened possibilities for scholars to enhance their traditional workflows. Enabled by digitization projects, humanities scholars can nowadays reach a large number of digitized texts through web portals such as Google Books or Internet Archive. Digital editions exist also for ancient texts; notable examples are PHI Latin Texts and the Perseus Digital Library.
This shift from reading a single book “on paper” to the possibility of browsing many digital texts is one of the origins and principal pillars of the digital humanities domain, which helps developing solutions to handle vast amounts of cultural heritage data – text being the main data type. In contrast to the traditional methods, the digital humanities allow to pose new research questions on cultural heritage datasets. Some of these questions can be answered with existent algorithms and tools provided by the computer science domain, but for other humanities questions scholars need to formulate new methods in collaboration with computer scientists.
Developed in the late 1980s, the digital humanities primarily focused on designing standards to represent cultural heritage data such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for texts, and to aggregate, digitize and deliver data. In the last years, visualization techniques have gained more and more importance when it comes to analyzing data. For example, Saito introduced her 2010 digital humanities conference paper with: “In recent years, people have tended to be overwhelmed by a vast amount of information in various contexts. Therefore, arguments about ’Information Visualization’ as a method to make information easy to comprehend are more than understandable.” A major impulse for this trend was given by Franco Moretti. In 2005, he published the book “Graphs, Maps, Trees”, in which he proposes so-called distant reading approaches for textual data that steer the traditional way of approaching literature towards a completely new direction. Instead of reading texts in the traditional way – so-called close reading –, he invites to count, to graph and to map them. In other words, to visualize them.
This dissertation presents novel close and distant reading visualization techniques for hitherto unsolved problems. Appropriate visualization techniques have been applied to support basic tasks, e.g., visualizing geospatial metadata to analyze the geographical distribution of cultural heritage data items or using tag clouds to illustrate textual statistics of a historical corpus. In contrast, this dissertation focuses on developing information visualization and visual analytics methods that support investigating research questions that require the comparative analysis of various digital humanities datasets. We first take a look at the state-of-the-art of existing close and distant reading visualizations that have been developed to support humanities scholars working with literary texts. We thereby provide a taxonomy of visualization methods applied to show various aspects of the underlying digital humanities data. We point out open challenges and we present our visualizations designed to support humanities scholars in comparatively analyzing historical datasets. In short, we present (1) GeoTemCo for the comparative visualization of geospatial-temporal data, (2) the two tag cloud designs TagPies and TagSpheres that comparatively visualize faceted textual summaries, (3) TextReuseGrid and TextReuseBrowser to explore re-used text passages among the texts of a corpus, (4) TRAViz for the visualization of textual variation between multiple text editions, and (5) the visual analytics system MusikerProfiling to detect similar musicians to a given musician of interest. Finally, we summarize our and the collaboration experiences of other visualization researchers to emphasize the ingredients required for a successful project in the digital humanities, and we take a look at future challenges in that research field
Interactive Visual Analysis of Translations
This thesis is the result of a collaboration with the College of Arts and Humanities at Swansea University. The goal of this collaboration is to design novel visualization techniques to enable digital humanities scholars to explore and analyze parallel translations. To this end, chapter 2 introduces the first survey of surveys on text visualization which reviews all of the surveys and state-of-the-art reports on text visualization techniques, classifies them, provides recommendations, and discusses reported challenges.Following this, we present three visual interactive designs that support the typical digital humanities scholars workflow. In Chapter 4, we present VNLP, a visual, interactive design that enables users to explicitly observe the NLP pipeline processes and update the parameters at each processing stage. Chapter 5 presents AlignVis, a visual tool that provides a semi-automatic alignment framework to build a correspondence between multiple translations. It presents the results of using text similarity measurements and enables the user to create, verify, and edit alignments using a novel visual interface. Chapter 6 introduce TransVis, a novel visual design that supports comparison of multiple parallel translations. It incorporates customized mechanisms for rapid and interactive filtering and selection of a large number of German translations of Shakespeare’s Othello. All of the visual designs are evaluated using examples, detailed observations, case studies, and/or domain expert feedback from a specialist in modern and contemporary German literature and culture.Chapter 7 reports our collaborative experience and proposes a methodological workflow to guide such interdisciplinary research projects. This chapter also includes a summary of outcomes and lessons learned from our collaboration with the domain expert. Finally, Chapter 8 presents a summary of the thesis and future work directions
Variable Format: Media Poetics and the Little Database
This dissertation explores the situation of twentieth-century art and literature becoming digital. Focusing on relatively small online collections, I argue for materially invested readings of works of print, sound, and cinema from within a new media context. With bibliographic attention to the avant-garde legacy of media specificity and the little magazine, I argue that the “films,” “readings,” “magazines,” and “books” indexed on a series of influential websites are marked by meaningful transformations that continue to shape the present through a dramatic reconfiguration of the past. I maintain that the significance of an online version of a work is not only transformed in each instance of use, but that these versions fundamentally change our understanding of each historical work in turn. Here, I offer the analogical coding of these platforms as “little databases” after the little magazines that served as the vehicle of modernism and the historical avant-garde. Like the study of the full run of a magazine, these databases require a bridge between close and distant reading. Rather than contradict each other as is often argued, in this instance a combined macro- and microscopic mode of analysis yields valuable information not readily available by either method in isolation. In both directions, the social networks and technical protocols of database culture inscribe the limits of potential readings. Bridging the material orientation of bibliographic study with the format theory of recent media scholarship, this work constructs a media poetics for reading analog works situated within the windows, consoles, and networks of the twenty-first century
Interactive Visual Alignment of Medieval Text Versions
Textual criticism consists of the identification and analysis of variant readings among different versions of a text. Being a relatively simple
task for modern languages, the collation of medieval text traditions ranges from the complex to the virtually impossible depending on the degree of instability of textual transmission. We present a visual analytics environment that supports computationally aligning such complex textual differences typical of orally inflected medieval poetry. For the purpose of analyzing alignment, we provide interactive visualizations for different text hierarchy levels, specifically, a meso
reading view to support investigating repetition and variance at the line level across text segments. In addition to outlining important
aspects of our interdisciplinary collaboration, we emphasize the utility of the proposed system by various usage scenarios in medieval French literature
The Digital Humanities and Literary Studies
This book delivers an introduction and overview of developing intersections between digital methods and literary studies. The Digital Humanities and Literary Studies serves as a starting place for those who wish to learn more about the possibilities, and the limitations, of the oft-touted digital humanities in the literary space. The volume engages with the proponents of digital humanities and its detractors alike, aiming to offer a fair and balanced perspective on this controversial topic. The book combines a survey and background approach with original literary research and, therefore, straddles the divide between seasoned digital experts and interested newcomers
Communicating the Unspeakable: Linguistic Phenomena in the Psychedelic Sphere
Psychedelics can enable a broad and paradoxical spectrum of linguistic
phenomena from the unspeakability of mystical experience to the eloquence of
the songs of the shaman or curandera. Interior dialogues with the Other,
whether framed as the voice of the Logos, an alien download, or communion
with ancestors and spirits, are relatively common. Sentient visual languages are
encountered, their forms unrelated to the representation of speech in natural
language writing systems. This thesis constructs a theoretical model of
linguistic phenomena encountered in the psychedelic sphere for the field of
altered states of consciousness research (ASCR). The model is developed from
a neurophenomenological perspective, especially the work of Francisco Varela,
and Michael Winkelman’s work in shamanistic ASC, which in turn builds on
the biogenetic structuralism of Charles Laughlin, John McManus, and Eugene
d’Aquili. Neurophenomenology relates the physical and functional
organization of the brain to the subjective reports of lived experience in altered
states as mutually informative, without reducing consciousness to one or the
other. Consciousness is seen as a dynamic multistate process of the recursive
interaction of biology and culture, thereby navigating the traditional
dichotomies of objective/subjective, body/mind, and inner/outer realities that
problematically characterize much of the discourse in consciousness studies.
The theoretical work of Renaissance scholar Stephen Farmer on the evolution of
syncretic and correlative systems and their relation to neurobiological
structures provides a further framework for the exegesis of the descriptions of
linguistic phenomena in first-person texts of long-term psychedelic selfexploration.
Since the classification of most psychedelics as Schedule I drugs,
legal research came to a halt; self-experimentation as research did not.
Scientists such as Timothy Leary and John Lilly became outlaw scientists, a
social aspect of the “unspeakability” of these experiences. Academic ASCR has
largely side-stepped examination of the extensive literature of psychedelic selfexploration.
This thesis examines aspects of both form and content from these
works, focusing on those that treat linguistic phenomena, and asking what
these linguistic experiences can tell us about how the psychedelic landscape is
constructed, how it can be navigated, interpreted, and communicated within its
own experiential field, and communicated about to make the data accessible to
inter-subjective comparison and validation. The methodological core of this
practice-based research is a technoetic practice as defined by artist and
theoretician Roy Ascott: the exploration of consciousness through interactive,
artistic, and psychoactive technologies. The iterative process of psychedelic
self-exploration and creation of interactive software defines my own technoetic
practice and is the means by which I examine my states of consciousness employing
the multidimensional visual language Glide
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