Visualising Shifting Concepts over Time

https://openmethods.dariah.eu/2017/11/13/design-and-implementation-of-shico-visualising-shifting-concepts-over-time/ OpenMethods introduction to: Visualising Shifting Concepts over Time 2017-11-13 12:11:58 Introduction: Concepts are described differently in different times, and the way people talk about them reveals much about how people perceive these concepts. Researchers of the eScience Center in Amsterdam together with scholars from Utrecht University developed a visual tool to gain insight into such concept shift. Joris van Zundert http://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/346303 Blog post Analysis Content Analysis Creation Designing Digital Humanities English Interpretation Language Methods Modeling Programming Research Activities Research Objects Stilistic Analysis Text via bookmarklet

Introduction by OpenMethods Editor (Joris van Zundert): Concepts are described differently in different times, and the way people talk about them reveals much about how people perceive these concepts. Researchers of the eScience Center in Amsterdam together with scholars from Utrecht University developed a visual tool to gain insight into such concept shift.

 

In different times, people use different words to describe concepts. Change and stability in word usage are possible indicators of wider socio-cultural changes. To gain insight into how people perceive concepts, it is valuable to trace how the words denoting a certain concept change over time. Existing tools for exploring historical concepts, such as keyword searching or topic modeling, are ill-suited for the task; they are either too top-down or too rigid for an iterative exploration of historical concepts in large data sets. In this article, we present ShiCo: a graphical interface for visualising concepts over time by monitoring shifts in word usage in a document corpus.

 

Original publication date: 2016.

Source: Design and implementation of ShiCo : Visualising shifting concepts over time

Author: Author on Source

Drs. Joris J. van Zundert (1972) is a senior researcher and developer in humanities computing. He holds a research position in the department of literary studies at the Huygens Institute for the History of The Netherlands, a research institute of The Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). His main interest as a researcher and developer is in the possibilities of computational algorithms for the analysis of literary and historic texts, and the nature and properties of humanities information and data modeling. His current research focuses on computer science and humanities interaction and the tensions between hermeneutics and ‘big data’ approaches.