Pennants for Descriptors

The technique is pennant diagrams, introduced with several kinds of bibliographic data in White (2007a, b, 2009, 2010). White’s examples to date, including the one in this paper, have required datagathering in the Dialog search system (with its Rank command), to which many information scientists lack access. However, simple pennant diagrams, using 25 co-cited author names, have also been programmed into Drexel University’s AuthorWeb system (White et al. 2001; Lin et al. 2003). As designers experiment with new ways of visualizing knowledge organization systems for their users, there seems little impediment to including pennant diagrams. The only data they require are (a) a usersupplied seed term to initiate the display, (b) non-zero co-occurrence counts of every term with the seed, and (c) total frequency counts for each of these co-occurring terms in the database.