Hermeneuti.ca – The Rhetoric of Text Analysis

Voyeur Tools was using a powerful and flexible Flash-based charting library called Open Flash Chart. This library could draw data dynamically, handle hover and click events, and export images, among other features. Some of the scripting was a bit awkward, especially when crossing the web page and Flash membrane (and particularly with variable and function scope), but it was manageable. However, I recently started seeing some errors in certain circumstances, especially in Firefox and IE. These inconsistent errors are very difficult to debug and fix, because, well, they're inconsistent, and debugging between the browser and Flash is an exercise in blindness. I'd fixed previous problems with the use of the library, but I wanted to try to avoid the headache again if I could.

I considered various HTML5 charting libraries, and in particular the ones mentioned the ones mentioned here. We're already using the Javascript Infovis Toolkit, so that would have been my first choice, but there didn't seem to be a clear way to create a simple line chart. After trying a few, I settled on Highcharts; I like the feature set, I like the appearance, and I like the mix of defaults (more concise) and flexibility in overriding defaults. Mostly, I'm just amazed and the embarassement of riches in the quality of the libraries available (how well they work and how well they're documented).

Since the library uses the Canvas tag from HTML5, there are some backwards compatibility issues with browsers, but it works in Firefox 2, Safari 3, Chrome and even back to IE6 (rendering is done through VML). Of course, this means it also work on an iPad – just what you needed to do text analysis, right?

We've updated the current version of Voyeur with a maintenance release that includes a fix to a bug that prevented users from doing phrase searches (actually, the search worked the first time, but not subsequent times).

To do a phrase search, simply type in the phrase into the search box (with no quotes). This will search for the exact sequence of types (currently lower case word forms). No proximity search is currently supported (with words in between), though some simple regular expressions can be used:

• i love (exact sequence)
• i love.* (other characters can follow after love, e.g. "i loved")
• i .*?ve\b (any character can precede "ve" at the end of the word, e.g. "i live")

I cleaned up most of the embedded tools in Now Analyze That, including a call to the distribution chart in Voyeur. The last step will be to see if the new Voyeur Links tool can be inserted in the place of the visual collocator, though we may want to keep a static image there to show a certain layout of the words tha couldn't be achieved with a single call.

There's now a stub page for the Recipes – now I have to start filling them in...

We've moved the domain to a TAPoR server at McMaster to get better performance than the shared commercial server where it was hosted before. This will also make it easier for us to host Voyeur tools at voyeur.hermeneuti.ca (though the tools aren't yet available).