9 Visualisation

Sunoikisis Digital Classics, Fall 2020

Session 9. Visualisation

Thursday Dec 3, 16:00 UK = 17:00 CET

Convenors: Aurélien Berra (Paris Nanterre), Gabriel Bodard (University of London), Naomi Wells (University of London)

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/1nDK1DqMp_g

Slides: tba

Session outline

This session will follow up on the approaches discussion in previous sessions on computational lingustics and using treebanks to present a third digitally assisted or “distance reading” method to text analysis. We will begin with an introduction to the Voyant Tools suite, and a discussion and demonstration of its use for analysing texts and corpora visually. We will then move to a discussion of visualisations of text and data more generally, including research and communication issues, and round off with a discussion of a few interesting examples of visualisations.

Seminar readings

[For discussion in this forum thread]

• Drucker, Johanna, “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display”, Digital Humanities Quarterly 5.1, 2011, http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000091/000091.html.
• Glinka K., Pietsch C. and Dörk M., “Past Visions and Reconciling Views: Visualizing Time, Texture and Themes in Cultural Collections”, Digital Humanities Quarterly 11, 2017. Available: http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/11/2/000290/000290.html.

Further reading

• Hawkins, Laura F., “Computational Models for Analyzing Data Collected from Reconstructed Cuneiform Syllabaries”, Digital Humanities Quarterly 12.1, 2018, http://digitalhumanities.org:8081/dhq/vol/12/1/000368/000368.html.
• Rockwell, Geoffrey and Sinclair, Stéfan, “The Swallow Flies Swiftly Through: An Analysis of Humanist”, in Hermeneutica. Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 2016, http://hermeneuti.ca/swallow-flies.
• Friendly, Michael, “A Brief History of Data Visualization”, in Handbook of Computational Statistics: Data Visualization, Springer Verlag, 2006, 15-56. Available: http://www.datavis.ca/papers/hbook.pdf.
• Risam, R. (2019). “Beyond the Migrant ‘Problem’: Visualizing Global Migration.” Television & New Media 20(6), 566–580. (abstract)
• Rockwell, Geoffrey, “What is Text Analysis, Really?”, Literary and Linguistic Computing 18.2, 2003, 209-219. Available: http://www.geoffreyrockwell.com/publications/WhatIsTAnalysis.pdf.
• Schöch, Christof, “Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities”, Journal of Digital Humanities 2.3, 2013, http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/2-3/big-smart-clean-messy-data-in-the-humanities/.
• Tufte, Edward R., The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Cheshire, Connecticut, Graphic Press, 2nd ed., 2001.

Resources

• Sinclair, Stéfan and Rockwell, Geoffrey, Voyant Tools, 2016, http://voyant-tools.org/. Tutorial: https://voyant-tools.org/docs/#!/guide/tutorial.
• Data visualisation galleries
  • Holtz, Yan and Healy, Conor, From Data to Viz, https://www.data-to-viz.com, 2018.
  • Holtz, Yan, The R Graph Gallery, http://r-graph-gallery.com, 2018.
  • Holtz, Yan, The Python Graph Gallery, https://python-graph-gallery.com, 2017.
  • Kucher, Kostiantyn and Kerren, Andreas, Text Visualization Browser, https://textvis.lnu.se/, 2015.
• Healy, Kieran, Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2019, https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691181615/data-visualization – online draft, 2018, http://socviz.co/.
• Wilke, Claus O., Fundamentals of Data Visualization: A Primer on Making Informative and Compelling Figures, Sebastopol, CA, O’Reilly Media, 2019. Website version, 2019, https://serialmentor.com/dataviz/ – see especially chap. 5, “Directory of visualizations”, https://serialmentor.com/dataviz/directory-of-visualizations.html.
• Seeing Data. Developing Visualisation Literacy, 2016, http://seeingdata.org/.

Exercise

1. Voyant Tools

• Select an Ancient Greek or Latin (or translated) text to analyse and import it into Voyant Tools

• Explore several visualisations, and test the effect of applying a stopword list to understand the interest of this typical pre-processing step (Voyant provides customisable lists for several languages)

• Visualise and reflect: What do you observe? Which types of visualisation were most useful to get insights into this corpus, and why? Which visualisation seemed most obscure or least useful?

• Do the same analysis again on a lemmatised text (if you have used one of the texts suggested below, we also provide lemmatised versions): What is the impact of such linguistic annotation on the visualisations produced by Voyant?

• Suggested texts (if you have no preferences):

  • Iliad: Monro-Allen 1920 edition in Perseus (XML); Lemmatised version of this edition (TXT)
  • Odyssey: Murray 1919 edition in Perseus (TXT) and compressed file with separate files for the books (ZIP, can be loaded into Voyant to get one “document” per book); Lemmatised version of Murray edition in Perseus (TXT); lemmatised files for the same edition (ZIP)
  • Sallust: Ahlberg 1919 edition (TXT); Lemmatised version of Ahlberg edition (TXT)

2 Tableau and Rawgraphs

• …

[If you have any technical problems with this exercise, you may ask for help in this forum thread]