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Purpose of phrase nets

Phrase nets are overview visualizations of unstructured texts. Such overviews can have multiple purposes. They can, for instance, serve as a summary of a text, which can be used to get an idea of the text's content, before actually reading it. Another use case of phrase nets is the comparison of multiple different texts.
Generally the exploration of text with phrase nets can be categorized in one of two approaches. Either different regular expressions are applied to the same text or the same expression is applied to multiple different texts, to compare them to each other.

How to use our implementation

1. Choose a text to analyze

The first step is to choose a text to generate a phrase net from. This text can either be loaded from a local .txt-file or it can be the text of an online Wikipedia article. To load a local file, press the "Load file"-button and choose the desired file. To load the text of an online article, press the "Load Wikipedia-article"-button and provide the URL of the desired article. (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_visualization)

2. Change parameters (optional)

There are multiple parameters that can be changed, which affect the resulting phrase net.
The selected metric defines how the nodes' size and color and the links' width are scaled. There are two pre-defined metrics to choose from and a "Custom Metric". By choosing the "Custom Metric", a new "Settings"-button appears. This button shows and hides the metric menu. In this menu the mapping of data to visuals can be defined. The small information buttons to the right give further instructions on which parameters can be mapped. By pressing the "Update changes"-button the new metric is used on the phrase net.
In the textbox below the metric a number can be specified. This number defines the maximum number of displayed links.
In the last row above the visualization, the regular expression for the phrase net can be specified. The two grey boxes specify which words should be linked to each other. The default expression "\w+" stands for any word. These words make up the nodes of the phrase net. The middle box specifies which word or sentence should connect the two nodes. These connections are visualized by the links in the net. The two boxes left and right of the expression are meant for pre- and suffixes. Here an expression which should occur before or after the desired phrase can be specified.

3. Generate the phrase net and explore the visualization

After loading a text and setting up the parameters as desired, the "Use pattern"-button generates and visualizes the phrase net. The visualization can be zoomed with the mouse wheel and translated by clicking and dragging on the background space. The phrase net itself can also be adjusted, by clicking and dragging nodes to another location. Relocating nodes can sometimes help to disentangle overlapping links. Nodes are never able to overlap.