Miriam Butt and Mennatallah El-Assady
Visual Analytics for Linguists

DGfS-CL Tutorial
March 2018, Stuttgart

Description

The aim of this course is to provide an introduction to the emerging field of the visualization of linguistic information (LingVis). LingVis combines techniques developed in the fields of Information Visualization (InfoVis) and Visual Analytics with methodology and analyses from theoretical and computational linguistics. 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, sunburst visualizations and glyphs of varying complexity. We present concrete use cases of LingVis for synchronic and diachronic linguistic questions, particularly show-casing our recent work on political argumentation within the VisArgue project and the new platform HistoBankVis for working with diachronic treebanks. A part of the course will include a hands-on session 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