Abundantia Verborum

3. Tutorial

3.3 Displaying statistics

The graphically oriented nature of Abundantia Verborum, although omnipresent, is probably most striking in its functions for displaying statistics. The main mechanism Abundantia Verborum uses for displaying statistics is the graph mechanism, a mechanism that uses diagrams to represent the distribution of certain labels over the data in a workshop.

The graph mechanism

The graph mechanism is the subject of 3.3 Displaying statistics. Basis topics are explained in 3.3.1 Using diagrams. The different types of diagrams and their semantics are the topic of 3.3.2 Venn, Hasse and Schematic diagrams. The next section, 3.3.3 The display threshold introduces a technique for simplifying and interpreting very complex diagrams. After that, two sections are dedicated to the interaction of the graph mechanism with certain classification tools. They are 3.3.4 Diagrams and implied labels and 3.3.5 Filtered diagrams. The final section, 3.3.6 Zooming in on diagram parts reveals the dynamical nature of the diagrams, showing how you can navigate through them to get to specific parts of the data collection.

Other ways of obtaining statistical information

The graph mechanism is the major, but not the only technique in Abundantia Verborum for obtaining statistical information. Other mechanisms are:

• certain minor tools of Abundantia Verborum that represent statistical information about workshops in a non-graphical way: e.g. the label co-occurrence table.
• a tool for exporting a workshop together with its classification information (its labels) to a relational database so that a relational database management system can be use for obtaining statistical information; this technique may be useful for creating classical diagrams such as pie charts, bar charts, etc.
• mechanisms for directly retrieving statistics from corpora, bypassing the workshop level: e.g. basic corpus statistics, frequency lists, concordances, ...