Two studies centering on visualization of place names in literary texts are introduced. Research on toponym extraction is discussed and in an interdisciplinary perspective: Distant reading and digital literary studies are not mere numeric accounts.

A new paradigm in “digital humanities” – you know, that Silicon Valley of textual studies geared towards neoliberal narrowing of research (highly provocative but interesting read nonetheless)… A new paradigm resides in the belief that understanding language (e.g. literature) is not accomplished by studying individual texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data (Jockers 2013). Because it is impossible for individuals to “read” everything in a large corpus, advocates of distant reading employ computational techniques to “mine” the texts for significant patterns and then use statistical analysis to make statements about those patterns (Wulfman 2014).

One of the …

I would like to present work on the major social bookmarking and microblogging platform Reddit, which I recently introduced at the NLP4CMC workshop 2015. The article published in the proceedings is available online: Collection, Description, and Visualization of the German Reddit Corpus.

Basic idea

The work described in the article directly follows from the recent release of the “Reddit comment corpus”: Reddit user Stuck In The Matrix (Jason Baumgartner) made the dataset publicly available on the platform archive.org at the beginning of July 2015 and claimed to have any publicly available comment.

Corpus construction

In order to focus on …

Let’s pretend you recently installed R (a software to do statistical computing), you have a text collection you would like to analyze or classify and some time to lose. Here are a few quick commands that could get you a little further. I also write this kind of cheat sheet in order to remember a set of useful tricks and packages I recently gathered and from which I thought they could help others too.

Letter frequencies

In this example I will use a series of characteristics (or features) extracted from a text collection, more precisely the frequency of each …

In his professorial thesis (or habilitation thesis), which is about to be made public (the defence takes place next week), Ludovic Tanguy explains why and on what conditions data visualization could help linguists. In a previous post, I showed a few examples of visualization applied to the field of readability assessment. Tanguy’s questioning is more general, it has to do with what is to include in the disciplinary field of linguistics.

He gives a few reasons to use the methods from the emerging field of visual analytics and mentions some of its upholders (like Daniel Keim or Jean-Daniel Fekete …

It is not only a matter of scale : the perspective one chooses is crucial when it comes to visualize how difficult a text is. Two main options can be taken into consideration:

• An overview in form of a summary which enables to compare a series of phenomena for the whole text.
• A visualization which takes the course of the text into account, as well as the possible evolution of parameters.

I already dealt with the first type of visualization on this blog when I evoked Amazon’s text stats. To sum up, their simplicity is also their main problem, they …

I already mentioned Amazon’s text stats in a post where I tried to explain why they were far from being useful in every situation: A note on Amazon’s text readability stats, published last December.

I found an example which shows particularly well why you cannot rely on these statistics when it comes to get a precise picture of a text’s readability. Here are the screenshots of text statistics describing two different books (click on them to display a larger view):

The two books look quite similar, except for the length of the second one, which seems to …

Last Monday, I released an updated version of both corpus and visualization tool on the occasion of the DGfS-CL Poster-Session in Frankfurt, where I presented a poster (in German).

The first version had been made available last summer and mentioned on this blog, cf this post: Introducing the German Political Speeches Corpus and Visualization Tool.

For stability, the resource is available at this permanent redirect: http://purl.org/corpus/german-speeches

Description

In case you don’t remember it or never heard of it, here is a brief description:

The resource presented here consists of speeches by the last German …

Last week, I improved the CSS file that displays the (mostly long) texts of the German Political Speeches Corpus, which I introduced in my last post (“Introducing the German Political Speeches Corpus and Visualization Tool”). The texts should be easier to read now (though I do not study this kind of readability), you can see an example here (BP text 536).

I looked for ideas to design a clean and simple layout, but I did not find what I needed. So I will outline in this post the main features of my new CSS file:

• First of all, margins, font-size …