Data visualization in historical sociolinguistics
Tanja Säily (University of Helsinki)
In this workshop we will compare various real-world examples of visualizations in historical sociolinguistics, both static and interactive. The second day will be devoted to a hands-on case study, possibly with the students' own data.
Learning objectives:
Students will learn the basics of information visualization (Ware 2012) as applied to historical sociolinguistics. They will know how to explore their data to generate hypotheses and insights, how to choose the most suitable visualization for the task at hand, and where to find more information on producing the visualization.
Topics:
Examples of static visualizations to be covered include line graphs, scatterplots, boxplots and beanplots in the context of historical sociolinguistics (e.g. Siirtola et al. 2011), while interactive visualization will be explored through tools like motion charts (Hilpert 2011), Text Variation Explorer (Siirtola et al. 2014), Khepri (Mäkelä et al. 2016) and types2 (Säily & Suomela 2017). Time permitting, we will also briefly consider interactive maps and network graphs.
Although some of the examples have been created using the R environment, this is not an R workshop and no knowledge of programming is expected. Everyone will be able to partake in the joy of discovery through visualization.
Hilpert, Martin. 2011. Dynamic visualizations of language change: Motion
charts on the basis of bivariate and multivariate data from diachronic corpora.
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 16(4). 435–461. doi:10.1075/ijcl.16.4.01hil
Mäkelä, Eetu, Tanja Säily & Terttu Nevalainen. 2016. Khepri – a
modular view-based tool for exploring (historical sociolinguistic) data. In
Maciej Eder & Jan Rybicki (eds.), Digital Humanities 2016: Conference
abstracts, 269–272. Kraków: Jagiellonian University & Pedagogical
University. http://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/226.
Säily, Tanja & Jukka Suomela. 2017. types2: Exploring word-frequency differences in corpora. In Turo
Hiltunen, Joe McVeigh & Tanja Säily (eds.), Big and rich data in English
corpus linguistics: Methods and explorations (Studies in Variation,
Contacts and Change in English 19). Helsinki: VARIENG. http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/series/volumes/19/saily_suomela/.
Siirtola, Harri, Terttu Nevalainen, Tanja Säily
& Kari-Jouko Räihä. 2011. Visualisation of text
corpora: A case study of the PCEEC. In Terttu Nevalainen & Susan M.
Fitzmaurice (eds.), How to deal with data: Problems and approaches to the
investigation of the English language over time and space (Studies in
Variation, Contacts and Change in English 7). Helsinki: VARIENG. http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/series/volumes/07/siirtola_et_al/.
Siirtola, Harri, Tanja Säily, Terttu Nevalainen
& Kari-Jouko Räihä. 2014. Text Variation Explorer:
Towards interactive visualization tools for corpus linguistics. International
Journal of Corpus Linguistics 19(3). 417–429. doi:10.1075/ijcl.19.3.05sii
Ware, Colin. 2012. Information visualization: Perception for design. 3rd ed. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/book/9780123814647
Ware, Colin. 2012. Information visualization: Perception for design. 3rd ed. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/book/9780123814647
