Software Support for Discourse-Based Textual Information Analysis: A Systematic Literature Review and Software Guidelines in Practice

Abstract

The intrinsic characteristics of humanities research require technological support and software assistance that also necessarily goes through the analysis of textual narratives. When these narratives become increasingly complex, pragmatics analysis (i.e., at discourse or argumentation levels) assisted by software is a great ally in the digital humanities. In recent years, solutions have been developed from the information visualization domain to support discourse analysis or argumentation analysis of textual sources via software, with applications in political speeches, debates, online forums, but also in written narratives, literature or historical sources. This paper presents a wide and interdisciplinary systematic literature review (SLR), both in software-related areas and humanities areas, on the information visualization and the software solutions adopted to support pragmatics textual analysis. As a result of this review, this paper detects weaknesses in existing works on the field, especially related to solutions’ availability, pragmatic framework dependence and lack of information sharing and reuse software mechanisms. The paper also provides some software guidelines for improving the detected weaknesses, exemplifying some guidelines in practice through their implementation in a new web tool, Viscourse. Viscourse is conceived as a complementary tool to assist textual analysis and to facilitate the reuse of informational pieces from discourse and argumentation text analysis tasks.

Of Course it's Political! A Critical Inquiry into Underemphasized Dimensions in Civic Text Visualization

“…The review in this section focuses on prior text visualization survey papers, due both to the volume of text visualization research [KK14] and to the existence of numerous prior surveys [AL19b]. To find these survey papers, we searched scholarly repositories (e.g., IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, Google Scholar) with the queries “text visualization survey” and “text visualization review.” Doing so identified 17 survey papers [ŠB10; PSB10; AdOP12; SWLL13; GZL∗14; NPW14; WSJ∗14; LCWL14; KK15; JFCS15; CC16; FHKM17; JFCS17; KPK18; LWC∗19; MS20; AL19b], all of which are reviewed here.…”

“…Across the 17 survey papers reviewed [ŠB10; PSB10; AdOP12; SWLL13; GZL∗14; NPW14; WSJ∗14; LCWL14; KK15; JFCS15; CC16; FHKM17; JFCS17; KPK18; LWC∗19; MS20; AL19b], visualizations were consistently described as supporting primarily analytic activities that are engaged in by some sort of analyst . For instance, Š ilić and B ašić [ŠB10, p. 39] explicitly describe text visualizations as being designed for “media analysts, historians and other scientists from all fields.” As another example, J änicke , F ranzini , C heema , and S cheuermann [JFCS15, p. 1] focus on “humanities scholars […] interested in the analysis of related texts or text passages.” Other surveys name the intended users less specifically.…”

“…To make this argument, in Section 2 we clarify how our sense of the term “political” draws on prior work [Asa00; Bec02; BS99; Mou99; Mou13; Win80] and highlight how visualization can and often should be seen as a political process, one that grants representation and authority to some voices while potentially marginalizing others. However, using a critical literature review [a la BVSD07; BHP∗12; BKM∗14] of text visualization survey papers [ŠB10; PSB10; AdOP12; SWLL13; GZL∗14; NPW14; WSJ∗14; LCWL14; KK15; JFCS15; CC16; FHKM17; JFCS17; KPK18; LWC∗19; AL19b; MS20], we find that text visualization research embodies a largely apolitical orientation that treats both the design and the use of text visualization systems purely as processes of analysis (Section 3). Then reviewing the status quo of civic text visualization [e.g., KMF∗12a; ZNB15; FBRG10; 19; JHSM21; HC16b; ZVK17], we find that civic text visualization inherits this analytic orientation, implicitly casting the treatment of public input as an analytic process.…”

Struggling with digitized historical newspapers: Contextual barriers to information interaction in history research activities

“…This change has come at a price, however. Scholars have reported problems with the quality of digitized content, such as poor optical character recognition (OCR) quality (Jarlbrink & Snickars, 2017;Terras et al, 2018) and technical and other problems with the interfaces and tools (Martin-Rodilla & S anchez, 2020).…”

Editorial for the Special Issue on “Digital Humanities”

“…to obtain distance measurements between isolated languages in Europe, whereas "Software Support for Discourse-Based Textual Information Analysis: A Systematic Literature Review and Software Guidelines in Practice" [8] produces a systematic literature review of software tools for discourse analysis and introduces some guidelines for developing and adopting these tools.…”