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General:Voyeur Bubblelines

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

Bubblelines is a visualization tool that helps to understand patterns of word repetition in one or more documents. Each document is represented as a horizontal line and each seach term is represented as a bubble – the bubble represents the frequency of the term in the corresponding segment of text (the text is divided into segments of equal length). The larger the bubble, the more frequent the term.

Ingredients

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

Preloaded Corpora

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

Basic Steps

1. Go to http://voyeurtools.org/tool/Bubblelines/ 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. Hovering over a bubble, or set of bubbles, will cause a box to appear that displays the frequency counts for that segment of text.
5. Similarly, hovering over the number at the end of the line will cause a box to appear that summarizes the frequency for the entire document.
6. When Bubblelines first loads a corpus, you may see terms that have been pre-selected and included in the URL or embedded page. If no terms are specified, Bubblelines automatically fetches the five most frequent terms and displays bubbles based on those. You can remove the default terms by clicking on the “Clear Terms” button.
7. You can add additional terms to be displayed using the “Find Term” box. Note that available terms will appear as you type and you can pick an item from the list to have it added.
8. In addition to adding and removing terms, you can toggle the display of the terms that have been loaded. To do so simply click on the term (active terms are underlined).

Suggested Activities

• Add terms of interest, and remove or toggle off ones that you do not want to see.
• Compare the lines and bubbles, and find interesting patterns.

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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 Bubblelines is available here: http://entry.tapor.ca/?id=10

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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