Visualize Scholarly Trends
This is a recipe to use textual visualization tools to identify streams of thought, trends and potential avenues for scholarly investigation
Ingredients
- An area of scholarly interest
- An Aggregated Collection of Abstracts
- A WordCloud tool such as the TAPoR Word Cloud Tool
- A Visual Collocation tool such as the TAPoR Visual Collocator Tool
This recipe needs a good exercise to demonstrate how to Visualize Scholarly Trends?Steps
- Consider an area of potential scholarly interest;
- Collect a representative series of abstracts from existing scholarship
;
- Aggregate the text of these abstracts using a dedicated text aggregator or simply by using a text editor;
- Generate a word cloud from the aggregated abstracts using a tool such as the TAPoR Word Cloud Tool
;
- Consider the word cloud identifying most common words and mentally constructing word groups;
- Generate a visual collocaton diagram using a tool such as the TAPoR Visual Collocator Tool;
- Explore particularly interesting words through the interactive diagram returned;
- Construct an avenue for further exploration from the identified trends, gaps and questions raised through visual examination.
Discussion
Finding Abstracts
Possible sources for electronic abstracts are listed on the Electronic Texts Panel of TAPoR.Glossary
- Word Cloud
- A visual presentation of keywords drawn from a text, visually differentiated based on their position and frequency of use in that text.
Next Steps/Further Information
- List of All Recipes
- Visualize Scholarly Trends?
- Help with Particular Tools
- Background on Text Analysis