Miriam Butt and Dominik Sacha
Visual Analytics for Linguists

DGfS-CL Tutorial
February 2016, Konstanz

Description

The aim of this course is to introduce students to the emerging field of the visualization of linguistic information (LingVis) which combines techniques developed in the fields of Information Visualization (InfoVis) and Visual Analytics with methodology and analyses from theoretical and computational linguistics. This allows for novel perspectives on linguistic data patterns. Besides standard visualization techniques such as bar charts, scatterplots or line charts, a large number of advanced novel methods have been developed. Prominent examples are treemaps, pixel displays, or the sophisticated visualizations of graphs for modeling complex interactions. We aim to introduce students to the basic principles of InfoVis and present concrete use cases of LingVis in both synchronic and diachronic dimensions. A part of the course will include hands-on sessions in which students can experiment with pre-prepared data sets and freely accessible LingVis software in order to investigate how complex linguistic questions can profit from visual analysis.

Course Material