Tech Report HCIL-2006-01

Plaisant, C., Rose, J., Yu, B., Auvil, L., Kirschenbaum, M., Smith, M., Clement, T., Lord, G. (January 2006)
Exploring Erotics in Emily Dickinson's Correspondence with Text Mining and Visual Interfaces
Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, JCDL 06, 141-150 (nominated for Best Paper award) [Published Version]
HCIL-2006-01

This paper describes a system to support humanities scholars in their interpretation of literary work. It presents a user interface and web architecture that integrates text mining, a graphical user interface and visualization, while attempting to remain easy to use by non specialists. Users can interactively read and rate documents found in a digital libraries collection, prepare training sets, review results of classification algorithms and explore possible indicators and explanations. Initial evaluation steps suggest that there is a rationale for “provocational” text mining in literary interpretation.