Text Variation Explorer: Towards interactive visualization tools for corpus linguistics

This paper reviews the gap between current methods of text visualization and the needs of corpus-linguistic research, and introduces a tool that takes a step towards bridging that gap. Current text visualization methods tend to treat the problem as a data-encoding issue only, and do not strive for interactive, tightly coupled representations of text that would foster discovery. The paper argues that such visualizations should always be linked for effortless movement between the text and its visualization, and that the visualization controls should provide continuous and immediate feedback to facilitate exploration. We introduce a tool, Text Variation Explorer (TVE), to demonstrate the aforementioned requirements. TVE allows visual and interactive examining of the behaviour of linguistic parameters affected by text window size and overlap, and in addition, performs interactive principal component analysis based on a user-given set of words.