Exploring erotics in Emily Dickinson's correspondence with text mining and visual interfaces

ABSTRACT

This paper describes a system to support humanities scholars in their interpretation of literary work. It presents a user interface and web architecture that integrates text mining, a graphical user interface and visualization, while attempting to remain easy to use by non specialists. Users can interactively read and rate documents found in a digital libraries collection, prepare training sets, review results of classification algorithms and explore possible indicators and explanations. Initial evaluation steps suggest that there is a rationale for "provocational" text mining in literary interpretation.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  J. Computer Applications
  J.5 ARTS AND HUMANITIES
      Subjects: Literature

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.6 Library Automation
          Subjects: Large text archives
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.5 PATTERN RECOGNITION
      I.5.4 Applications
          Subjects: Text processing

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
case studies, humanities, literary criticism, text mining, user interface, visualization