We have developed two prototype applications with colleagues from The Times online labs to show how interactive visualization of the bookScraper collection may help us identify trends and anomalies in the data set. Doing so may give us ideas about the collection as we aim to explore the data and gain insights from it.
The applications are designed to support analysis of the titles according to their content and the use of particularly important words and how this compares between authors. They are indicative of the kind of visualization work that we do at the giCentre
Vocabulary Cluster Graph
Our interactive 'cluster graph' was designed to help compare the books in the collection based on the similarity of their vocabularies.
The more similar two publications are, the closer they appear to one another in the graph - groups of books with similar vocabularies cluster.
« Click the image to run the application.
Visualization developed by Dr. Jo Wood
with Dr. Jason Dykes, Dr. Aidan Slingsby, Jonathan Richards and Julian Burgess
Vocabulary TreeMap
Our interactive 'treemap' allows us to explore the 100 most important words in each of the publications. These words are represented by rectangles sized according to the number of times they occur in a document.
The largest rectangles occur to the top left showing the authors who use the most words, the books with most words for each author and the most popular words in each book at different levels of the hierarchy. Publications with more words cover a larger area - as do authors with larger total word counts.
« Click the image to run the application.
Visualization developed by Dr. Aidan Slingsby
with Dr. Jason Dykes, Dr. Jo Wood, Jonathan Richards and Julian Burgess
You can learn more about processing, visualizing and using digital information through our Masters programmes and modules available through flexible modes of study.