WordSeer: Exploring Language Use in Literary Text

Increasing numbers of primary and secondary source texts in the humanities have been digitized in recent years. Humanities scholars who want to study these new collections in depth need computational assistance because of their large scale. We have built WordSeer, a text analysis tool that includes visualizations and works on the grammatical structure of text extracted using highly accurate off-the shelf natural language processing tools. We have focused on the task of exploring language use patterns in a collection of North American slave narratives, but the technique is applicable to any text collection. Our preliminary user studies with humanities scholars show that WordSeer makes it easier for them to translate their questions into queries and find answers to their questions compared to a standard keyword-based search interface. In this paper, we present the system currently under development and describe text analysis features we plan to include in the next iteration.