Hermeneuti.ca – The Rhetoric of Text Analysis

Lava allows you to view multiple levels of a corpus in a three-dimensional environment. Clicking on certain documents within the corpus expands the Lava visualization in a ring to explore further. By clicking on certain parts of the visualization, you are able to explore terms within their contextIn text analysis, context refers to the text surrounding a string of characters, which may be as short as a word or as long as a paragraph. Context is particularly important when generating a concordance for a string. Return to Glossary..

Getting Started Interface Elements Exporting

Getting Started

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

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

Lava 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

Lava 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.

When you first launch Lava (with a predefined corpus and multiple documents), you will see what looks like a black pole. (If you launch with one document, Lava will look like a black disc.) If you hover on sections of this pole you will see it illuminate with the names of different documents within the corpus.

If you click on an illuminated part of the pole, Lava will expand as a colourful ring – each colour representing a high frequency term. If you hover over any of the coloured sections, it will illuminate and show the term that it represents.

If you click on the term, it will expand as a coloured arm out from the centre. There are different sections of this arm as well. When you hover over them, it will show the term in the contextIn text analysis, context refers to the text surrounding a string of characters, which may be as short as a word or as long as a paragraph. Context is particularly important when generating a concordance for a string. Return to Glossary. of the document. Clicking this term will take you to a more in-depth analysis.

Clicking other sections of the pole will expand other documents within the corpus so you may visualize and interact with them as well.

Exporting

Like all Voyeur tools, Lava 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.