Plots () and Key-word Links ()

The point of it…

is to find out which key-words are most closely related to a given key-word.

A plot will show where each key word occurs in the original file. It also shows how many links there are between key-words.

What are links?

Links are "co-occurrences of key-words within a collocational span". An example is much easier to understand, though:

Suppose the word elephant is key in a text about Africa, and that water is also a key word in the same text. If elephant and water occur within a span of 5 words of each other, they are said to be "linked". The number of times they are linked like this in the text will be shown in the Links window.

The link spans (like collocation horizons) go from 1 word away to up to 25 words to left and right. The default is 1 to 5.

What you see

This is a key words list based on Romeo and Juliet, using all the 37 Shakespeare plays as the reference corpus.

This Links window shows a number of key words followed by the number of linked types (11 here) the total number of hits of the key word (ROMEO) and then the individual linked key words. You can if you wish double-click  in the Linked KWs column and you will see the details listed:

ROMEO has 11 linked words; it's linked 23 times with THOU, 15 times with O, etc. A right-click menu lets you copy or print these details.

Requirements

The procedure is text-oriented. You can only get a keywords links list if there is exactly one source text.

Double-click on any word in the plot listing to call up a window which show the linked key-words.

See also: Plot calculation, KeyWords clusters, Source Text