-
WordSeer: Exploring Language Use in Slave Narratives
More and more source text gets digitized in the humanities every day. Scholars who want to study these new collections in depth need computational assistance because of their large scale. To help, we built WordSeer, a text analysis tool that includes visualizations and works on the grammatical structure of text.
We focused on exploring language use patterns in a collection of American slave narratives, but the technique is applicable to any text collection. Our user studies with humanities scholars are showing that WordSeer makes it easier to translate their questions into queries and find answers to their questions compared to a standard search box. Here is a blog post with more detail, and some slides.
View the open source code on github!
-
People
Aditi Muralidharan is a third-year Ph.D student in the Department of Computer Science at UC Berkeley.
Marti Hearst is a Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
-
Research Partners
Bryan Wagner is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at UC Berkeley.