Lexical Cartography of DH2020

Lexical Cartography is a digital tool that combines network visualization and natural language processing to help scholars navigate scientific conferences in a new and innovative way. This tool visually displays conference speakers based on their lexical similarity, where the closer two speakers are in the visual space, the more their subject matters are related.

The tool was created by grouping articles from the conference Digital Humanities 2020, transforming tokens into graph edges connecting authors, and drawing the network as an interactive interface through JavaScript and WebGL. The resulting map displays the most relevant keywords and cartographic peaks when first loaded, and changes to display more detailed information about speakers as the viewer zooms in.

This map is part of a long-term open-source project, whose goal is to visually explore communities and their individuals through their texts. It represents a shift from traditional methods of visual analytics, which studied the dynamics of a community after the fact, to a contemporary tool that can be used by the community in real time.

While citation analysis is a valuable method for studying the evolution of scientific communities, Lexical Cartography provides a unique way to display ongoing events and foster connectivity.