The CHum Tool Network Visualization began as an experiment in visualizing the way tools interact within the conversation about tools. In this basic network visualization each node represents a single tool while each link represents the number of times a pair of tools are mentioned in the same article. Clicking on a node produces a timeline along the bottom representing the chronology of mentions for that particular tool. Unlike the other CHum visualizations, this project makes use of the entire CHum corpus.
The visualization makes use of two JSON files, nodes and links, that were created using R. The biggest implementation challenge in this project was deciding exactly what counted as a tool mention. Certain unsearchable names, such as to tool WORDS, are difficult to separate from their linguistic counterparts even using case sensitive searches. The software used to convert the pdf files into text files interprets CHum headers as being all capital letters. While much work has been done to clean the dataset of such false positives, mistakes are still possible. The visualization should be interpreted with this in mind.
Project Lead: Geoffrey Rockwell
Concept: Amy Dyrbye
Programming: Ryan Chartier