Good morning, everyone, and thank you for being here. As the slide says, I am going
to present the prototype visualization for the context and content analysis of references
in humanist monographs. First of all, if we were to summarize and simplify the theoretical
environment of citation analysis, which I know is impermanable, but I'm going to do
it anyway, the field is dominated by two competing ideological schools, and one of
their major bones of contention is the function of citation. While one school argues that
citations are dictated by the norms of academic acknowledgment, that what is considered important
and valuable is usually cited, and that in consequent citations are appropriate measurements
of academic productivity and value, the other school argues that the primary role of citations
is that of rhetorical instruments of persuasion. That is, authors try to persuade readers of
the validity of their own arguments by displaying their knowledge of the subject. Though a number
of researchers have tried to reconcile the two theories and find the middle path, the
differences between them are quite significant and manifest themselves in the research conducted
by each school. While the normative school of citations is focused on complex statistical
analysis of large-scale samples extracted from citation indexes, the supporters of the
rhetorical function of citation are conducting content and context analysis of citations and
interviews with authors or readers focused on identifying the mechanism of citation and the
functions played by references in academic writing. In terms of visual representations of
knowledge, our ultimate focus in inky, it is very common for the adepts of normative school to
produce various types of graphic representations of statistical data like the ones displayed here,
but to our knowledge so far, there are no visualization tools for the context and content
analysis of citations. We believe such a tool would be particularly beneficial for the study
of citation patterns in the humanities for all the reasons listed on the slide, and especially
so for the study of citation in humanist monographs. They're the number and complexity
of references would justify the use of visualizations to analyze how the references
contribute to the construction of the argument in large-scale academic work. Therefore, we designed
site lengths, the visualization tool for context and content analysis of citations. The prototype
we are building consists of two distinct views, compare, displayed here, and contextualize with
a secondary view for displaying the internal structure of complex footnotes. Some elements of
the interface are present in all views. The box to the far left contains the full bibliographic list
searchable and sortable by author name, title, and date. The number to the left of each entry,
I don't know if you can see it over there, represents the number of times a particular entry
is cited in the analyzed document. We consider the paramount importance to include in our tool
features that will allow the analysis in context of citations. So in order for the user to be
able to access the context of a selected citation at any given time, we included a skeleton reader
as a permanent fixture in site lengths. The last consistent element is the barcode representation
of the full text located to the far right of the visualization. That serves as a locator of the
selected citation, a zooming tool. Users have the option to zoom into a certain chapter within a
monograph, and the graphic image for the full structure of the text. The first view allows the
user to become familiar with the text, the structure and bibliographical apparatus of the
document visualized. Here at the center of stage is occupied by the spatial representation of up
to three distinct color coded sets of citations. Each set is defined by the user who applies
different filters in a faceted browser of references. Here you can see the set of citations
that meet a number of criteria defined by the user as they appear in text, the green one. And
in purple, the filtering option for the creation of the second set of citations for comparison
purposes. If the distribution in text of one or another citation set draws the attention of the
user to a certain location, he or she can further investigate the context of set citation
in the other view of sight lens. In terms of filtering options available, we decided to
include not only the geographic traits of the title cited, like publication type, language,
country and date, which have constantly made the object of attention in citation analysis, but
also the functions filled by those citations in relation to the citing text. This is a more
delicate inquiry since it involves a certain degree of interpretation on behalf of the person
who encoded the document. The function classification we adopted is based on the classification
developed by Carolyn Frost and distinguishes between primary and secondary sources, facts and
opinions cited, um, and also marks the quality of the relationship between the citing and cited
text. Since footnotes are still very common in humanist monographs, especially in traditional
disciplines, they have a substantial place in understanding the role of references and their
relationship with the citing text. The reason why footnotes are particularly important when
trying to understand citation in the humanities is tied into their potential for complexity.
Some footnotes, like the one shown here, contain both multiple references and fragments of
text related to said references and made, meant to place them in a certain context. We
considered the context, uh, in which a citation occurs, the span of text to which it is
closely connected to be of interest. So we decided to visually represent the connections
between text and citations, and also the relations were stated between different references
cited inside, inside the same footnote. We translated this initial metaphorical
representations of note, context, and structures into the second view of sight lens. Here
the sets of citations delineated in the compare view are maintained, while the list of
references is replaced by a list of individual instances of citation displayed
sequentially, just like the fragments of text in the central stage. The scene in the middle is
taken over by the representations of the spans of text as they are supported or not by
individual citations. The dots to the left of the text, the segments represent, I don't know
if you can see them, represent the number of individual references attached to the same
segment of text that usually means included in the same footnote or end note. When more
than one dot is attached to the same string of text, we are usually faced with a complex
footnote. To access a visual representation of it, the user needs to click on the gray
box containing the footnote in the reader. As you can see from this example, both the
relationship with the citing text and the relationships inside the footnote are marked.
The former by labels, which basically represent short forms for the function played by that
particular citation, and the letter by nesting. We'll look at this later in the next
slide. We learned from encoding our samples that references co-cited inside the same
footnote can be in three types of explicitly stated relationships, citing, cited by, and
alternative. We have in this particular case an enumeration of three citations. One of them
is given an alternative while another is mentioned together with one of its references.
This is the face of silence. A couple of very short considerations about its inner
workings as we are pressed by time. The documents included in the initial sample use a
modified version of TI Lite created using the Roma customization tool. In terms of
programming, we are building the application in Flash and applying the model view controller
design approach in order to ensure the flexibility and modularity of the code so as to be able
to keep and reuse as much as possible for future iterations of the tool. The prototype is
under construction as we speak and user testing is scheduled to be performed during the
following academic year. We are also considering adapting the tool for use on multi-touch
surfaces. At this point, though, in order for the tool to successfully prove its design, we
will need to scale up in terms of the number of samples included in the site length library.
In order to ensure markup consistency and in the hope that we will be able to easily adapt
existing TI compliant XMLs, we've kept the customization of TI Lite for our purposes to a
minimum. We are also hoping that the next iteration of the tool will be integrated with an XML
editor. I guess this concludes my talk on site lengths. Thank you and I'm looking forward to
your questions.
APPLAUSE