A Network Based Approach for the Visualization and Analysis of Collaboratively Edited Texts

This paper describes an approach for network text analysis and visualization for collaboratively edited documents. It incorporates network extraction from texts where nodes represent concepts identified from the words in the text and the edges represent relations between the concepts. The visualization of the concept networks depicts the general structure of the underlying text in a compact way. In addition to that, latent relations between concepts become visible, which are not explicit in the text. This work concentrates on evolving texts such as wiki articles. This introduces additional complexity since dynamic texts lead to dynamic concept networks. The presented method retains the user information of each revision of a text and makes them visible in the network visualization. In a case study it is demonstrated how the proposed method can be used to characterize the contributors in collaborative writing scenarios regarding the nature of concept relations they introduce to the text.