Philosophy

One of the problems with "hermeneutical annotating" projects is that this type of tagging strongly encourages a focusing on details and often makes it difficult to see the whole picture. Even when the user analyzes the annotated material, the analysis is usually question-dependent, revealing a small subset of the dimensions of the tagging. This complexity highlights the need for an advanced visualization of the hermeneutic metadata, that is, the manual annotations – and this is where visÀvis comes into play. While visualization can be question-dependent, it can also be used more freely. And despite all the problems associated with it, we assume that this is one of the most important paths for distant reading; there is no other way to see all the details from above. It should be noted in this context that, unlike close reading, where the scholar actually reads the text closely, distant reading – regardless of its specific history – is better understood as a metaphor. In other words, the reader extracts meaning from the corpus without actually reading it, à la Moretti. Analyzing text via visualization, then, is a perfect example of “reading” a text, without reading it at all.

visÀvis seeks to provide users with more than mere visualizations; it provides an interface that supports "speculative hermeneutics," by allowing a smooth transition between the smallest detail and the entire picture, and doing so in a playful manner. The tool provides the opportunity to “play” with the visualizations of the individual texts and group them in various configurations according to their similarity or dissimilarity, in order to provide the scholar with a fresh insight into the text and its annotations. This tool is somewhat similar to the well-known VOYANT visualization tool. While VOYANT focuses on the text in a way that encourages free speculation, visÀvis does the same with annotations as the object of analysis.

Practically, visÀvis is designed to assist scholars in recognizing patterns in annotated texts. The tool automatically imports tagged corpora from external annotation platforms (currently from CATMA and INCEpTION) and (re)presents them in various graphs and charts, provides comparative graphical tools for grouping the texts, and offers aggregative tools for inter- and intra-corpora relations. The tool offers five visualization possibilities: small multiple distribution charts of annotation categories within a text, an aggregated stacked area chart, a sunburst chart showing the proportions and quantities associated with each tag in the text, a force-directed network of annotation categories, and a bubble visualization. In addition, a dynamic visualization of the logical structure of a tagset as well as its manifestations in specific annotated texts is offered.

For further reading see: Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky and Ophir Münz-Manor, “Visualization of Categorization: How to See the Wood and the Trees," Digital Humanities Quarterly 17 (2023). https://dhq-static.digitalhumanities.org/pdf/000703.pdf.