Beavan, D., ‘Collocate Cloud: see collocations in a new way’. Paper delivered at Digital Resources for the Humanities & Arts 2007, Dartington College of Arts, 9-12 September 2007
This paper demonstrates how techniques used to browse folksonomies, such as the descriptions of online photographs, can be applied to language corpora. Tag clouds boil down the descriptions or tags associated with an item into a simple box of keywords. This paper shows how this principle can be applied to collocates, creating a web-based interface to allow effortless browsing of corpus data.
These ‘collocate clouds’ are alphabetically listed, letting the user quickly find or eliminate known words of interest. Crucially they also display frequency information as font size and collocational strength as text brightness. These visual aids present an overview of the data at a glance, helping identify areas of interest. Navigation is made easy by choosing any existing collocate as the node word of a new search. This iterative nature enables the user to explore in detail the interaction between different words and domains.