"PlotChange: A new feature of OWID to visualize diachronic lexical information interactively"
Alexander Koplenig, Carolin Müller-Spitzer, Annelen Brunner
Institute for the German language (IDS), Mannheim, Germany.
The Google Ngram Corpora offer a unique opportunity to study linguistic and cultural change in quantitative terms, even if the datasets are not accompanied by any metadata regarding the texts the corpora consist of and the data are truncated, to avoid breaking any copyright laws (Koplenig 2014, under review). The Google Ngram Viewer makes it possible to plot frequency profiles for words and phrases (up to five words) across the last centuries to study linguistic and cultural trends (Mann et al. 2014). It is not possible, however, to generate, for instance, a list that shows which words underwent the most pronounced change in frequency in a given time period. In our talk, we present the first version of such a tool, called PlotChange. This interactive online tool will be part of a new component of OWID, which is a lexicographic Internet portal for various electronic dictionary resources that are being compiled at the Institute for the German language (Müller-Spitzer 2010). In PlotChange, it is possible to select one of six languages (including two varieties of English), two periods of time from 1800 to 2000 and various part of speech categories. PlotChange automatically creates a word cloud of 64 words whose frequency changed most for the selected time periods. For the 20 most different words, PlotChange includes small multiples (Tufte 2001) that visualize the relative change of the respective time series. In our talk, we will focus the scientific and visual basis of this tool and put it into the perspective of the design of OWID. References Koplenig, Alexander. 2014. The impact of lacking metadata and data truncation for the measurement of cultural and linguistic change using the Google Ngram datasets (DRAFT - under review). http://hdl.handle.net/10932/00-023C-DD02-76AF-FF01-9. Mann, Jason, David Zhang, Lu Yang, Dipanjan Das & Slav Petrov. 2014. Enhanced Search with Wildcards and Morphological Inflections in the Google Books Ngram Viewer. Proceedings of the ACL 2014 System Demonstrations. Association for Computational Linguistics. Müller-Spitzer, Carolin. 2010. OWID – A dictionary net for corpus-based lexicography of contemporary German. In Anne Dykstra & Tanneke Schoonheim (eds.), Proceedings of the XIV Euralex International Congress, 445–452. Leeuwarden/Ljouwert: Fryske Akademy. Tufte, Edward R. 2001. The visual display of quantitative information. 2nd ed. Cheshire, Conn: Graphics Press.