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A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communication - University of Canberra (2017)

Text Analysis and Visualisation: creating deep interfaces to read textual document collections.

Screenshot of Area interface

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by Jaume Nualart Vilaplana
(University of Canberra)

ABSTRACT This research brings together data analysis with software engineering and visualisation, with a specific focus on text mining and large document collections. My aim is to devise new, rich, and simple visualisation interfaces, which I call deep interfaces. With deep interfaces I introduce the idea-rich content as a product of the statistical analysis combined with human curation of labels and interpreted as a flow of subjectivity, complexity, and diversity between reader and interface and vice versa. The focus of such interfaces is not the representation of textual document collections as in Moretti’s distant reading, but to revisit traditional reading from the point of view of state of the art methods of textual analysis. Thus, the proposed interfaces can help us discover and explore text document collections by reading their contents. This is a practice-led research project that develops theoretical issues through the generation of practical artefacts. The research process is cumulative, following a reflexive methodology.