Hermeneuti.ca – The Rhetoric of Text Analysis

Bubblelines is a visualization tool that helps to understand patterns of word repetition in one or more documents. Each document is represented as a horizontal lineA line is the string of text limited by the width of a page. Lines are often used in tokenization, and may contain parts of one or more sentences. For example "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." is a complete sentence and occurs on one line. By contrast, "Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor wood-cutter with his wife and his two children. The boy was called Hansel and the girl Gretel. He had little to bite and to break, and once when great dearth fell on the land, he could no longer procure even daily bread." spans three sentences and four lines. Return to Glossary. and each seach term is represented as a bubble – the bubble represents the frequency of the term in the corresponding segment of text (the text is divided into segments of equal length). The larger the bubble, the more frequent the term.

Getting Started Interface Elements Exporting

Getting Started

When you first arrive to the Bubblelines tool you will see one of two possible screens:

Bubblelines without a pre-loaded corpus. See loading texts into Voyeur for help on how to proceed.

Bubblelines with a pre-loaded corpus. You were probably given a URLA URL (Uniform Resource Locator), sometimes called a web address, is used to locate and identify web content. For more information, see the Wikipedia. Return to Glossary. that included the corpus, or you're viewing a page that has an embedded Voyeur tool in it. If you prefer, you can also start without a corpus.

Interface Elements

Bubblelines includes the standard set of interface elements (see image to the right). For more help with these see the Voyeur Tools Standard Interface Elements page.

Hovering over a bubble, or set of bubbles, will cause a box to appear that displays the frequency counts for that segment of text.

Similarly, hovering over the number at the end of the lineA line is the string of text limited by the width of a page. Lines are often used in tokenization, and may contain parts of one or more sentences. For example "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." is a complete sentence and occurs on one line. By contrast, "Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor wood-cutter with his wife and his two children. The boy was called Hansel and the girl Gretel. He had little to bite and to break, and once when great dearth fell on the land, he could no longer procure even daily bread." spans three sentences and four lines. Return to Glossary. will cause a box to appear that summarizes the frequency for the entire document.

When Bubblelines first loads a corpus, you may see terms that have been pre-selected and included in the URLA URL (Uniform Resource Locator), sometimes called a web address, is used to locate and identify web content. For more information, see the Wikipedia. Return to Glossary. or embedded page. If no terms are specified, Bubblelines automatically fetches the five most frequent terms and displays bubbles based on those.

You can remove the default terms by clicking on the "Clear Terms" button.

You can add additional terms to be displayed using the "Find Term" box. Note that available terms will appear as you type and you can pick an item from the list to have it added.

In addition to adding and removing terms, you can toggle the display of the terms that have been loaded. To do so simply click on the term (active terms are underlined).

Exporting

Like all Voyeur tools, Bubblelines can be reused in a variety of ways:

• create a link that is specific to the corpus and options that are currently being used
• embed the current corpus and options as a tool in an external page

For more information see exporting and reusing Voyeur Tools.