KWICis: An interactive key word in context visualization for structured data

KWICis a modern concordance (keyword in context = KWIC) visualization that is interactive and designed for structured data. It is meant to complement my DoubleTreeJS, "a more compact view of words in their context of use than a traditional concordance (KWIC)".

Here are a few sample uses, which illustrate different possibilities:

• Basic example
• Basic example with a script written right to left (N'Ko)
• Filtering and metadata (May hang in Safari!) shows how KWICis can be filtered, and how to visualize metadata using color. Uses lemmas rather than tokens. Also allows a new search by clicking on any item in the result.
• Use regular expressions to search plain text Also allows a new search by clicking on any item in the result.
• Use regular expressions to search structured text Also allows a new search by clicking on any item in the result.
• Clustering with KWICis and DoubleTreeJS Clustering search results, integration with DoubleTreeJS
  This example is unavailable until DoubleTreeJS is upgraded to work with version 4 of D3.
• Basic example again: functionally the same as the first basic example, but shows a different way of getting the input data (mainly of interest to developers).

Hint: in basic examples and in the regular expressions with structured text, you can use text files which have the part of speech (POS) immediately following word, separated by a slash: espresso/NN. There is nothing special about POS information: you can put any information after the slash and the filtering and sorting will (should) work with that information.

KWICis is still very much under development, and this is not a final release. Any feedback is appreciated.

How to use KWICis with your own data

The basic samples should be usable as is. The data format is extremely simple: your input file should have one item per line, with the word first, and optionally followed by a "/" and then a part of speech. e.g.

Not/RB
only/JJ
Robin/NP
himself/PP
but/RB
all/PDT
the/DT
band/NN
were/VBD
outlaws/NNS

For more advanced users, there is jsdoc API documentation. The philosophy is very much the same as DoubleTreeJS. With KWICis, I have included a new regular expression based text model, which has not yet been added to DoubleTreeJS.

Compatibility

KWICis has been tested with current versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari on OS X, as well as some older browsers in Windows. Older versions of Safari may not allow local files to be read, in which case you will not be able to try your own data.

• KWICis does not function at all in IE (at least not version 9 or lower).

Download

KWICis is freely available under the new BSD license (see the source files). Download

If you use KWICis, please cite this web site.

Roadmap

This version of KWICis should be ready for casual use. Possible improvements:

• Clean up and restructure the examples
• More examples
• Multiple documents

Please let me know if you have other suggestions.

Acknowledgments

KWICis uses the D3 toolkit.

Thanks to L. Lee McIntyre and Eran Raveh for useful feedback and testing.

Version history

• Version 0.4.1
  kwicIS
  • Improved compatibility with current browsers
  • Updated to work with version 4 of D3
    Note: a version compatible with version 3 of D3 is included in the download in the folder "for_d3-v3".
  Examples
  • No new examples
• Version 0.4
  kwicIS
  • Added the ability to display right to left languages correctly via the rtToLeft getter/setter
  Examples
  • Added the basic-right-to-left.html example
• Version 0.3
  • kiwcIS
    • added filteredIDs() to get the ids of just the data satisfying the current filters
    • fixed off by one error in calculating the last page of results
    • fixed bugs in filtering
    • moved TextHash, RegExTextModel and TextModelUtilities to new textmodels folder
  • Examples
    • All: improved UI
      • added navigation buttons below KWIC
      • added history
      • added "Loading..." when file is loading
    • basic_with_strings and basic_with_objects and filtered_with_metadata
      • showed added alt-click to show context
      • fixed bug with quotation marks for searching
    • Filtered with metadata
      • Length of result bars is proportional to the number of results
      • added chi-square significance test
      • Fixed UI bug when filtering
    • Structured regex
      Fixed issue with empty search expression
    • Added doubletree kwicis cluster
• Version 0.2
  • First publicly available version
• Version 0.1
  • First version done as an example for the class Scientific Visualization of Language Data

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4 February 2016