I’m beginning to play with visual tools for text analysis. Here’s some useful resources and explanation why.

In a bit of an “aha!” moment last week, I realised that a problem with my research into kindness and libraries may be solved by grabbing large datasets produced by a bibliographic search, and then playing with visualisation.

“Kindness” is a single term that represents a multi-faceted concept, used differently according to which discipline is describing it. I have been trying to find a way to validly come up with a top ten or so of possible meanings that may be useful when discussing it in libraries. It did not feel right to just sit at my desk, hunting and pecking through databases for much-cited works and saying (as one often does in a literature review),  “I am smart and thorough, so what I found is representative of what is there”.

I LOVE that the best tools in the area are free and open source. How knowledge should be 🙂

In a session run by ALIA Academic and Research Libraries Group here in Perth last week, Samantha Blake ran though the two text visualisation tools below.

VOSViewer – created at Leiden University in the Netherlands for visualising bibliometric analysis. Can ingest data produced from a number of bibliographic sources like Scopus or Web of Science and visualise interrelationships like do-authorships or subject clustering. Here it is mapping the topic clusters for 40 records from Web of Science retrieved from a search for “kindness”.

Voyant Tools Workbench- created by two Canadian academics, this has a number of different ways of conceptualising bibliographic data. Here is a file of over 1000 Web of Science records with a search on “kindness”, with just “WOS” and “journal” manually added as stop words. The lower left window appears be a topic modelling analysis, which means that a separate pass with something like the MAchine Learning to LanguagE Toolkit (MALLET) may not be necessary.

Other tools I have been fiddling with are:

Open Knowledge Maps , a “visual interface to the world’s scientific knowledge”. It doesn’t play with your data, but retrieves clusters of papers from their dataset of OA works, around the same themes.

Google Books Ngram Viewer – plots frequency of term in Google’s scanned books project – sadly only until 2008. For me, this is very annoying, as there was a definite trend upward in the term “kindness” (blue line below) in the last 10 years of the data, and I would like to know if it continued.

Some unexplored but similar visual text analysis tools:

• Scimat – University of Granda, Spain
• BibExcel – created by Olle Persson, who is wonderfully described in German as a Informationswissenschaftler
• Pajek – from the University of University of Ljubljana,  Slovenia
• CiteSpace – Chaomei Chen at Drexel
• Doing it all from scratch in R . R for Social Scientists at data carpentry is a good starting point.
• (Tableau . Commercial. Corporate. Not OSS. Not my kind of tool at all – which is why I should check it out before rejecting it )

Directories of many, many more tools:

• TAPor 3 – The Text analysis Portal for Research. Canadian-based directory of over 900 tools useful for text analysis

• DIRT directory. Directory of digital research tools. Support from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation with initial support of US universities

And some jumping-off points where other tools and techniques can be explored:

• DH101: A Highly Opinionated Resource Guide by Miriam Posner
• Digital Tools and suchlike. A list for Australian historians, Tim Sherratt
• HASS DEVL – Australian Humanities and Social Sciences. Includes its own instance of Voyant Tools

This was me. Does it sound like you ?

• Too many tabs open in my browser …I think 64 was my record. In just one window. I am also a great “that is too messy, so I will open a nice, clean window” (but not close the other open ones) kind of woman.
• But….I can’t close the open tabs because some must be useful, this is DAYS worth of tab-opening right here.
• Can’t find what I want, so…I’ll just open that tab again, rather than locate the right tab.
• My laptop is slowing down because displaying the fiddly bits on the open pages is hogging memory.
• I know I will use these nine web pages each workday, and am sick of opening them each morning.
• Oh damn!! I didn’t mean to close that tab, and now I can’t remember how exactly I got to it
• What do you MEAN Chrome on iOs does not have a “close all tabs” function??? Well, OK, I will just keep opening them ad infinitum.
• I have six or so webpages that I am working on for this temporary job, and having to locate them all again over and over each day is annoying..

I solved all these by tweaking some settings and installing one extension … read on …

I am using Chrome, but you can do all this for Firefox too

Tab Tip 1: Default tabs to open on startup

I use the same set of tabs during my workday. Use “preferences” to add a set of tabs that will open when you start your browser:

Voila! My email, calendar, staff login, Blackboard, to do list and WordPress installation open when I open the browser.

Tab Tip 2: Re-open a tab you closed accidentally

Just use <CTRL> T . Tab restored!

UPDATE 19 April 2018 – NO, that opens a new tab … I meant <CTRL> <SHIFT> T – THAT will do the trick

Tab Tip 3: Close all those tabs – and have them ready to open again with one click – One Tab

The browser extension, One Tab allows you to go from a browser with way too many kittenwar.com tabs open:

To a neat list of links in a single page – taking up far less memory – at the click of an icon:

I also use this to quickly create a list of links for an email. Open the tabs you want to share in your browser, turn them into a list of labelled links with OneTab, then copy and paste the links into the document.

If you want to get to the pages again from the OneTab page, you can either click on the individual link, or use the “Restore All” option to re-open them all together:

Tab Tip 4: Lock a group of tabs and have them ready for regular re-use

For 14 weeks of Semester I have eight Blackboard Discussion Boards to check daily. Every semester they are different sites, so have a different URL.

So, each semester, I slurp them all up into OneTab , rename them to something sensible and then use the  “lock” function to keep them there so they will always be around.

Tab Tip 5: Add webpages to the startup screen of your iOs device

I check the news headlines and the weather on my iPad every morning. I use Chrome as my browser on iOs, but discovered (with snail and Peter helping me by double-checking) that there is no way to instantly close all the open tabs. You can on Android. Not on the iPad or iPhone. No really good explanation why.

As an alternative, I use the feature in Safari that allows me to add webpages to the startup screen, then group them into a folder.

So, if every morning (for reasons unexplained) I wanted to check the comments on the “people test drive the Licki brush on their cats” video:

Then I could just click on the “Share” option, and then choose “Add to Home Screen”:

Instead of leaving the icons all over the startup screen, you can then slide one icon on to the other, to create a neat folder for all your frequently used webpages.