The Linguistic Construction of World: An Example of Visual Analysis and Methodological Challenges

In this chapter, the authors discuss common approaches using data visualizations within the field of digital humanities. They argue that by assigning equal importance to the development, as well as the usage of a visualization framework, researchers can question dogmatic ‘best-practice’ norms for data visualizations which may prevent them from developing visualizations that can be used to find emergent phenomena within the data. They then focus on the question, how visualizations reconstitute language by using diagrammatic operations. Working with digital visualizations, the technological background is of big importance for the interpretation and the development of new tools. As an example, they present their visualization framework ‘geocollocations’ which can be used as a tool to detect words that typically collocate with toponyms in text corpora