WordSeer Website (Web Resource)
Title: WordSeer Website
Author: Aditi Muralidharan
Abstract: A Text Analysis Environment for Humanities Scholars
WordSeer is a text analysis environment that combines visualization, information retrieval, sensemaking and natural language processing to make the contents of text navigable, accessible, and useful.
Year: 2011
Primary URL: http://wordseer.berkeley.edu/
Primary URL Description: Website for the WordSeer Project
WordSeer Open Source Software (Computer Program)
Title: WordSeer Open Source Software
Author: Aditi Muralidharan
Author: Ian MacFarland
Author: Hassan Jannah
Author: David Bendebury
Author: Raymon Sutedjo-The
Abstract: WordSeer is a text analysis environment that combines visualization, information retrieval, sensemaking and natural language processing to make the contents of text navigable, accessible, and useful. You can run WordSeer on your local machine or on a shared server, and you access it via your modern web browser of choice (Google Chrome works best, though).
If you're a scholar who's interested in using Wordseer for your research, read on. If you want to learn more about how to contribute to WordSeer's ongoing design and development, take a look at our Guidelines for Contributors.
You can find much more information on WordSeer, including demo videos, use case studies, and background research, at wordseer.berkeley.edu.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: https://github.com/Wordseer/wordseer/
Primary URL Description: Location of the open source code of WordSeer 4.0 on Github.
Secondary URL: http://wordseer.berkeley.edu/wordseer-4-0/
Secondary URL Description: Location of code for WordSeer 4.0 from the WordSeer site.
Programming Language/Platform: Python, javascript,
Source Available?: Yes
WordSeer 4.0 Demonstration Videos (Blog Post)
Title: WordSeer 4.0 Demonstration Videos
Author: Marti Hearst
Abstract: WordSeer 4.0 How-To Videos
Date: 2/24/2016
Primary URL: http://wordseer.berkeley.edu/wordseer-4-0-how-to-videos/
Primary URL Description: Location of how to videos on the WordSeer site.
Blog Title: WordSeer 4.0 How-To Videos
Website: WordSeer
Improving the Recognizability of Syntactic Relations Using Contextualized Examples (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Improving the Recognizability of Syntactic Relations Using Contextualized Examples
Author: Aditi Muralidharan
Author: Marti Hearst
Abstract: A common task in qualitative data analysis
is to characterize the usage of a linguistic
entity by issuing queries over syntactic
relations between words. Previous interfaces
for searching over syntactic structures
require programming-style queries.
User interface research suggests that it is
easier to recognize a pattern than to compose
it from scratch; therefore, interfaces
for non-experts should show previews of
syntactic relations. What these previews
should look like is an open question that
we explored with a 400-participant Mechanical
Turk experiment. We found
that syntactic relations are recognized with
34% higher accuracy when contextual examples
are shown than a baseline of naming
the relations alone. This suggests
that user interfaces should display contextual
examples of syntactic relations to help
users choose between different relations.
Date: 6/22/2014
Primary URL: http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hearst/papers/acl14grammatical.pdf
Primary URL Description: url for paper
Conference Name: ACL
Supporting Exploratory Text Analysis in Literature Study (Article)
Title: Supporting Exploratory Text Analysis in Literature Study
Author: Aditi Muralidharan
Author: Marti Hearst
Abstract: We present WordSeer, an exploratory analysis environment for literary text. Literature study is a cycle of reading, interpretation, exploration, and understanding. While there is now abundant technological support for reading and interpreting literary text in new ways through text-processing algorithms, the other parts of the cycle—exploration and understanding—have been relatively neglected. We are motivated by the literature on sensemaking, an area of computer science devoted to supporting open-ended analysis on large collections of data. Our software system integrates tools for algorithmic processing of text with interaction techniques that support the interpretive, exploratory, and note-taking aspects of scholarship. At present, the system supports grammatical search and contextual similarity determination, visualization of patterns of word context, and examination and organization of the source material for comparison and hypothesis building. This article illustrates its capabilities by analyzing language-use differences between male and female characters in Shakespeare’s plays. We find that when love is a major plot point, the language Shakespeare uses to refer to women becomes more physical, and the language referring to men becomes more sentimental. Future work will incorporate additional sensemaking tools to aid comparison, exploration, grouping, and pattern recognition.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/2/283.full?keytype=ref&%2520ijkey=nzuBUietose8TgW
Primary URL Description: url for paper
Access Model: subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Literary and Linguistic Computing
Publisher: Oxford Journals
WordSeer: A Knowledge Synthesis Environment for Textual Data (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: WordSeer: A Knowledge Synthesis Environment for Textual Data
Author: Aditi Muralidharan
Author: Marti Hearst
Author: Christopher Fan
Abstract: We describe WordSeer, a tool whose goal is to help scholars
and analysts discover patterns and formulate and test
hypotheses about the contents of text collections, midway
between what humanities scholars call a traditional “close
read” and the new “distant read” or “culturomics” approach.
To this end, WordSeer allows for highly flexible “slicing and
dicing” (hence “sliding”) across a text collection. The tool
allows users to view text from different angles by selecting
subsets of data, viewing those as visualizations, moving laterally
to view other subsets of data, slicing into another view,
expanding the viewed data by relaxing constraints, and so
on. We illustrate the text sliding capabilities of the tool
with examples from a case study in the field of humanities
and social sciences – an analysis of how U.S. perceptions of
China and Japan changed over the last 30 years.
Date: 10/27/2013
Primary URL: http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hearst/papers/cikmdemo2013.pdf
Primary URL Description: url for paper
Conference Name: CIKM