Descriptive presentation of text characteristics 

Visualizations of linguistics and visualization techniques for and from the analysis of texts offer a clear overview of text structures at the macro level. With a computer-based solution, these visualizations can be generated quickly and precisely and can thus be used efficiently in internal evaluation and presentation. Since the company's analytical approach to consulting already distinguishes its services from those of most of its competitors the clear and descriptive presentation of text characteristics can further sharpen the company's profile in the marketplace.

Innovative approaches

Both classical visualization approaches and innovative variants such as a glyph-based visualization for the client's data configuration could be tested. The integration of text examples and corpus entries represents an innovative but necessary step towards big data for linguistic analysis at macro level.

Procedure

In a first step, a use case was defined. The result of the linguistic analysis of a text corpus on macro level is represented with interactive visualization. Decisive requirements are clarity as well as the link with the texts on which the analysis is based.
Several visualization and interaction concepts were developed which address the properties of data abstraction and the analysis tasks of the clients appropriately.  Both force-directed node-link and matrix-based visualization techniques were evaluated as basis for presentation. A multiform overview/detail design was conceptualized for the interactive integration of the underlying texts.
For the technical implementation, the possibilities of the analysis tools Graph Commons, NodeXL, gephi and Cytoscape as well as the JavaScript library D3.js were compared.

Results

The project has created an essential foundation by bridging the specialist vocabularies of the disciplines and translating the linguistic analysis models into a data abstraction suitable for visualization design.