A Graph Based Abstraction of Textual Concordances and Two Renderings for their Interactive Visualisation

Concordancing, or the arranging of passages of a textual corpus in alphabetical order according to user-defined keywords, is one of the oldest and still most widely used forms of text analysis. It finds applications in areas such as lexicography, computational linguistics, translation studies and computer-assisted machine translation. Yet, the basic form of visualisation employed in the analysis of textual concordances has remained essentially the same since the keyword-in-context technique was introduced, over fifty years ago. This paper presents a generalisation of this technique as an analytical abstraction of concordances represented as undirected graphs, and then characterises keywords in terms of graph eccentricity properties. We illustrate this proposal with two distinct visual renderings: a mosaic (space-filling) display and a bi-directional hierarchical display. These displays can be used in isolation or in conjunction with traditional keyword-in-context components in an overview-plus-detail pattern, or as synchronised views. We discuss scenarios of use for these arrangements in lexicographical corpus analysis, in translation studies and in text comparison tasks.