Hermeneuti.ca – The Rhetoric of Text Analysis

Knots is a visualization tool that helps to understand patterns of word relevance in one or more documents. Each term is represented as a twisted lineA line is the string of text limited by the width of a page. Lines are often used in tokenization, and may contain parts of one or more sentences. For example "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." is a complete sentence and occurs on one line. By contrast, "Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor wood-cutter with his wife and his two children. The boy was called Hansel and the girl Gretel. He had little to bite and to break, and once when great dearth fell on the land, he could no longer procure even daily bread." spans three sentences and four lines. Return to Glossary. – when the lines overlap it means a relevance or linkage within the terms.

Getting Started Interface Elements Exporting

Getting Started

When you first arrive to the Knots tool you will see one of two possible screens:

Knots without a pre-loaded corpus. See loading texts into Voyeur for help on how to proceed.

Knots with a pre-loaded corpus. You were probably given a URLA URL (Uniform Resource Locator), sometimes called a web address, is used to locate and identify web content. For more information, see the Wikipedia. Return to Glossary. that included the corpus, or you're viewing a page that has an embedded Voyeur tool in it. If you prefer, you can also start without a corpus.

Interface Elements

Knots includes the standard set of interface elements (see image to the right). For more help with these see the Voyeur Tools Standard Interface Elements page.

As you hover over segments of lines, you will see them become highlighted. If you click on them, you will be taken to the Document KWICs tool for an analysis of the word in contextIn text analysis, context refers to the text surrounding a string of characters, which may be as short as a word or as long as a paragraph. Context is particularly important when generating a concordance for a string. Return to Glossary.. You also have the option to drag the Knots visualization by clicking and dragging the centre point.

When Knots first loads a corpus, you may see terms that have been pre-selected and included in the URLA URL (Uniform Resource Locator), sometimes called a web address, is used to locate and identify web content. For more information, see the Wikipedia. Return to Glossary. or embedded page. If no terms are specified, Knots automatically fetches the five most frequent terms and displays lines based on those.

When Knots first loads a corpus, you may see terms that have been pre-selected and included in the URLA URL (Uniform Resource Locator), sometimes called a web address, is used to locate and identify web content. For more information, see the Wikipedia. Return to Glossary. or embedded page. If no terms are specified, Knots automatically fetches the five most frequent terms and displays bubbles based on those.

You can remove the default terms by clicking on the "Clear Terms" button.

You can add additional terms to be displayed using the "Find Term" box. Note that available terms will appear as you type and you can pick an item from the list to have it added.

In addition to adding and removing terms, you can toggle the display of the terms that have been loaded. To do so simply click on the term (active terms are underlined).

Some options included in Knots are 'Build Speed', 'Starting Angle', and 'Tangles'. Build speed affects how quickly the visualization is performed. Starting angle adjusts the angle at which the lines expand and develop. Tangles affects how many twists there are within the visualization.

Exporting

Like all Voyeur tools, Knots can be reused in a variety of ways:

• create a link that is specific to the corpus and options that are currently being used
• embed the current corpus and options as a tool in an external page

For more information see exporting and reusing Voyeur Tools.