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General:Voyeur Word Trends

From CWRC

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Ingredients 3 Preloaded Corpora 4 Basic Steps 5 Suggested Activities 5.1 Screencasts 6 Discussion 6.1 Description 6.2 Who has worked on creating it 6.3 Where to read about it

Introduction

Term Frequencies Chart shows how terms are distributed across document(s) in a corpus (documents are shown in the order in which they were added). Once you arrive to Term Frequencies Chart, insert / upload your content and let the tool perform its analysis. Every charted line represents one word common throughout the entire corpus. If you hover over specific points it will give you specific information about that word in a specific document.

Ingredients

• A URL, some text, or a document, if available. Alternatively, you can use one of the corpora included with Cirrus.

Preloaded Corpora

• Novels of Jane Austen: http://voyeurtools.org/tool/TypeFrequenciesChart/?corpus=1308355966524.2331&stopList=stop.en.taporware.txt
• Novels of the Brontës: http://voyeurtools.org/tool/TypeFrequenciesChart/?corpus=1308356051583.4660&stopList=stop.en.taporware.txt
• Novels of George Eliot: http://voyeurtools.org/tool/TypeFrequenciesChart/?corpus=1308356746136.4470&stopList=stop.en.taporware.txt

Basic Steps

1. Go to http://voyeurtools.org/tool/TypeFrequenciesChart/ to load a document. Alternatively, use a preloaded corpus by clicking on one of the links above, and then skip ahead to step 4.
2. Provide a URL of a document you would like to visualize, or paste in some text. You can also upload your own document or open one of the included corpora by clicking the appropriate buttons.
3. Click “Reveal.”
4. When you analyze a corpus with Term Frequencies Grid, you will initially have common words at the top of the chart with colour codes. You will see lines within the graph which are coloured accordingly to those words. If you click on one of the terms at the top, it will omit that term from the graph.
5. When we hover over the segment points, we can see the frequency of that term in that segment. If you click on the point, Voyeur will open a new window with detailed information of that segment and term within its Document KWICs tool.
6. If you would like to see less or more segments on the chart, simply click on “Segments” at the bottom left of the chart to choose the desired segments.

Suggested Activities

• Try to develop new insights into the text by looking at the diagram.
• Find words of particular interest and investigate them with the Term Frequencies tool.

Screencasts

There is a screencast explaining how to load texts here: http://hermeneuti.ca/sites/default/files/loading.mov

Discussion

It is important to remember that this is a beta release, which means that there will be bugs. Don’t trust everything you see without stopping to consider that it might be a mistake of some kind. As Stéfan says, “expect the unexpected.”

Description

A document describing Word Trends is available here: http://entry.tapor.ca/?id=21

Who has worked on creating it

Voyeur is the product of Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell.

Where to read about it

No papers have been published at this point, although the journal Literary and Linguistic Computing has published many articles that show the kind of work that is possible with a tool like Voyeur. Here is one example:

Fink, Peter. “The Evolution of Order in the Chapter Lengths of Trollope's Novels.” Literary & Linguistic Computing (21:3) Sep 2006, 275-282.

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