Interactive Text Visualization with Text Variation Explorer

Abstract

Digitalization is changing how research is carried out in all areas of science. Humanities is no exception -- materials that used to be hand-written or printed on paper are increasingly available in digital form. This development is changing how scholars are interacting with their material. We are addressing the problem of interactive text visualization in the context of sociolinguistic language study. When a scholar is reading and analyzing text from a computer screen instead of a paper, we can support this by providing a dashboard for reading, and by creating visualizations of the text structure, variation, and change. We have designed and developed a software tool called Text Variation Explorer (TVE) for sociolinguistic language study. It is based on interactive visualization with a direct manipulation user interface, and aimed for exploratory corpus linguistics. The TVE software tool has proven to be useful in supporting the study of language variation and change in its social contexts, or sociolinguistics. It is, to a certain degree, language-independent, and generic enough to be useful in other linguistic contexts as well. We are now in the process of designing and implementing the next iteration of TVE. We present the lessons learned from the first version, discuss the old and the new design, and welcome feedback from the communities involved.