T EXT B ARCODE

A Visual Text Analytics Tool

B EHRANG Q. Z ADEH AND S IEGFRIED H ANDSCHUH

behrang.qasemizadeh@uni-passau.de, siegfried.handschuh@uni-passau.de

B ACKGROUND

V ISUALIZATION E LEMENTS

We introduce T EXT B ARCODE, a novel tool for exploratory text analysis. The design of T EXT B ARCODE is
motivated by the need for visual text analytic tools in
Humanities and Social Sciences. In these fields, scholars
often review thousands of documents to form a hypothesis and extract evidences. T EXT B ARCODE facilitates
these processes by providing a multi-scale visualization
of the density of sentiment polarity of text documents.

T EXT B ARCODE maps an input text into a multicolour

stripe. This stripe consists of a number of lines that
have particular width and colour. Each line represents
a text segment, e.g. a paragraph. The width of a line is
determined by the length of the text segment it represents, e.g. the number of sentences in a paragraph. The
colour of lines, however, shows the sentiment polarity
of text segments. In this visualization, a colour such as
green represents positive sentiment, a colour such as
black represents neutral sentiment and another colour
such as red represents negative sentiment.

M ETHOD
A T EXT B ARCODE is generated in a two-step procedure:

The

1. Decomposition process converts an input raw

text into several logical text segments, e.g. sections, pages, paragraphs, sentences and words.
Subsequently, text segments undergo a linguistic
process for the calculation of sentiment polarities.
2. Aggregation process maps the result of the linguistic analysis in the decomposition process to
the visualization units by computing width and
colours of lines that represent text units.

Countess

Cathleen

by William Butler Yeats;

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young

Man by James Joyce;

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad;

The figure below illusterates the details of processes

invloved in this methodology.

The Satanic Verses by Salman

Rushdi;

Hamlet by William Shakespeare.

Decomposition

Users can click on a line in this stripe to zoom in and

explore text segments. For instance, if a line represents
a paragraph, then clicking on the line shows a new
strip that provides a detailed factorization of sentiment
polarities of sentences in this paragraph. Similarly, if
a user click on a line that represents a sentence, a new
strip that shows sentiment polarity of words will be
visualized.

Aggregation

T EXT B ARCODE of Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study by Arthur Ransome;

example of a detailed sentiment polarity for a paragraph in this text.