Gord McNickle and I did a fun little project where we animated the word associations in Ecology abstracts over time. Words that are closer together in the animation occur more frequently in the same abstract. Those associations change over time, and scholars of the field may detect trends and cycles in the changing associations!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FJJPVmjOxU We used the VOS mapping and clustering technique as used in the VOS Viewer software (www.vosviewer.com) and described in Van Eck & Waltman 2010 (J of the Am Soc for Information Science & Technology) and references therein. To create fluid animations, we added an "inertia" term to their objective function that weights each word's spatial location in the previous frame. -Ray Dybzinski ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Ray Dybzinski | Assistant Professor | Institute of Environmental Sustainability, Loyola University Chicago
