Glimpses through the clouds: collocates in a new light

This paper demonstrates a web-based, interactive data visualisation, allowing users to quickly inspect and browse the collocational relationships present in a corpus. The software is inspired by tag clouds, first popularised by on-line photograph sharing website Flickr (www.flickr.com). A paper based on a prototype of this Collocate Cloud visualisation was given at Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts 2007. The software has since matured, offering new ways of navigating and inspecting the source data. It has also been expanded to analyse additional corpora, such as the British National Corpus (http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/), which will be the focus of this talk