7 research outputs found
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
Explorative Visual Analysis of Rap Music
Detecting references and similarities in music lyrics can be a difficult task. Crowdsourced knowledge platforms such as Genius. can help in this process through user-annotated information about the artist and the song but fail to include visualizations to help users find similarities and structures on a higher and more abstract level. We propose a prototype to compute similarities between rap artists based on word embedding of their lyrics crawled from Genius. Furthermore, the artists and their lyrics can be analyzed using an explorative visualization system applying multiple visualization methods to support domain-specific tasks
Transcribing Medieval Manuscripts for Machine Learning
In the early twentieth century, many scholars focused on the preparation of
editions and translations of texts previously available only to the few
specialists able to read archaic hands and privileged enough to travel to work
in person with them in manuscript. Valuable scholarship in its own right, the
preparation of these editions and translations for particular texts deemed
important enough to justify the effort and time, laid the foundation for
generations of scholarship in medieval studies. On the other hand, for many
materials in historical archival collections, including already digitised
collections, medievalists have only had the time to create partial
transcriptions, if any at all. Access to textual material from the medieval
period has increased greatly in recent years with digitisation, and we are able
to imagine many new research projects in decades to come. What challenges do
new frontiers of automation in the archives raise with respect to medieval
studies and in particular to the ways we transcribe? In this article, we argue
that if medievalists hope to pursue the kinds of analysis that goes on in
advanced computational research, we will need new kinds of transcriptions,
intentionally theorized not only for human reading, but also for machine
processing. We already have mature methods for remediating generations of
editions of medieval works such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), but we
can ask ourselves if these are the kinds of text we want to use for future
computational analysis. We suggest instead that one way forward is by going
back to the scriptorium
The Validity, Generalizability and Feasibility of Summative Evaluation Methods in Visual Analytics
Many evaluation methods have been used to assess the usefulness of Visual
Analytics (VA) solutions. These methods stem from a variety of origins with
different assumptions and goals, which cause confusion about their proofing
capabilities. Moreover, the lack of discussion about the evaluation processes
may limit our potential to develop new evaluation methods specialized for VA.
In this paper, we present an analysis of evaluation methods that have been used
to summatively evaluate VA solutions. We provide a survey and taxonomy of the
evaluation methods that have appeared in the VAST literature in the past two
years. We then analyze these methods in terms of validity and generalizability
of their findings, as well as the feasibility of using them. We propose a new
metric called summative quality to compare evaluation methods according to
their ability to prove usefulness, and make recommendations for selecting
evaluation methods based on their summative quality in the VA domain.Comment: IEEE VIS (VAST) 201
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
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