Contents
  1. Overview
  2. Options
  3. Spyral
  4. See Also

Trends

Trends shows a line graph depicting the distribution of a word’s occurrence across a corpus or document.

Use it with a Jane Austen corpus or with your own corpus.

Overview

Trends is a visualization that represents the frequencies of terms across documents in a corpus or across segments in a document, depending on the mode. Each series in the graph is coloured according to the word it represents, at the top of the graph a legend displays which words are associated with which colours. You can click on words in the legend to toggle their visibility. Hovering over any point in the graph causes a callout box to appear with information about the point, including the word, the frequency (raw or relative depending on mode), the document or document segment.

Trends with the Works of Jane Austen. You can also use Trends with your own corpus.

There are two modes for Trends:

  • corpus: when the corpus contains multiple documents, this shows the frequency of the term in each document
  • document when the corpus has one document or when the user has "drilled-down" (see section below) to the document level, this shows the frequency of the term for each segment in the document (segments are created automatically and are all of approximately the same length – see the Options for changing the number of segments to use)

Drill-Down

When in corpus mode you can double-click on an item to drill-down to the document level. This can be done in two ways:

  • Terms show the currently selected term for all documents
  • Document for the current document, show all available terms (from the legend)

You can always click on the "Reset" button in the bottom toolbar to reinitialize.

Drilldown

By default Trends shows a "Line + Stacked Bar" view, but that can be changed (see options below). The line graph is effective at showing trends in the values, though technically it's a bit misleading to have a continuous line for what are discreet categories on the bottom x-axis (each document or each document segment). The Stacked Bar, though faintly represented, tries to express the nature of the categoric data.

Options

You can add more terms by using the search box – simply type in a term and hit enter (see Search terms for more advanced searching capabilities).

You can click the "Reset" button to return to the defaults for the tool (this is especially useful if you've drilled-down on a term or document by double-clicking on the graph).

The Display buttons has two components:

  • Show Labels: determines if each item in the chart should be labeled (no by default)
  • Chart Mode:
    • Area: an area chart (labels aren't available for this kind of chart)
    • Columns: each item is its own column in each category
    • Line: line chart across categories
    • Stacked Bar: stacked bar chart (values are shown in columns)
    • Line & Stacked Bar (default): superimposed line and stacked bar chart

Clicking on the options icon allows you to define a set of stopwords to exclude – see the Stopwords guide for more information. The options also allow you to edit the colour Palette.

You can determine the number of segments to use when in Documents mode. The slider determines how many segments there will be in a document, so 10 (the default) means that each document is divided into 10 equal parts and then frequencies are determined for each part.

You can also select the frequency mode:

  • relative frequencies (default): term frequency in document or document segment
  • raw frequencies: the absolute count for each document or document segment

Spyral

To use the Trends widget in Spyral you can use the following code as a starting point. Modify the config object to modify the visualization.

let config = {
    "chartType": null,
    "docId": null,
    "docIndex": null,
    "labels": null,
    "limit": null,
    "mode": null,
    "query": null,
    "stopList": null,
    "withDistributions": null
}; 

loadCorpus("austen").tool("Trends", config);

Please see Tools.Trends for more information about configuration.

See Also