Visualise

Most options here are self-explanatory. Pick the results you want to plot, play with some options, and hit Plot. This can be a great way to identify salient linguistic features in your dataset. Once you’ve plotted something, a navigation pane appears under the figure, allowing scrolling, zooming, saving and so forth.

Below are explanations of the various options.

Visualisation options

Data to plot

Here, you select the interrogation or edited result you want to plot, as well its branch.

Single entry/subcorpus

If you like, you can plot only a single entry or subcorpus from an interrogation or edited result.

Results to show

Plot only the top n entries from the results of interest. If you don’t want these, go back to the Edit tab and remove/sort the results some more. You can type in all to get every result—but be warned, this often won’t look so good!

Kind of chart

You can choose between line, area, pie, bar or heat charts.

Axis labels

corpkit tries to guess useful axis labels. When it fails, you can enter your own.

Explode

When making pie charts, you can explode one or more results—that is, cut them slightly out of the pie for emphasis. Enter the name of the entry you want to explode, or use a list:

[me,myself,i]

Or use a pre-defined wordlist:

LIST:MENTAL

Log axes

You can plot using a logarithmic scale for either axis.

Cumulative

This option adds counts from previous subcorpora to later subcorpora, to give a cumulative distribution.

Transpose

Temporarily flip the x and y axis. This can be performed when editing, too.

Black and white

Render the figure in black and white. For line charts, try to create unique-looking line markers.

You could also use a greyscale colour scheme with a line plot, in order to produce a black and white figure without the complex line types

TeX

Checking the Use TeX option will mean that the plotter will try to use LaTeX to typeset the text in the chart. If you have a TeX distribution, but this option isn’t working for you, you may need to use the command-line version of corpkit.

Reverse legend

This option reverses the order in which legend entries occur. It can be useful when making horizontal bar (‘barh’) charts.

Subplots

Subplots creates a separate figure for each entry in your results. You might have to resize the figure a little when using this option to give it sensible proportions.

Grid

Show or hide the grid in the figure’s background.

Stacked

For bar charts, stack entries on top of each other, rather than beside each other.

Partial pie

If you’re making a pie chart, and the percentages don’t sum to 100%, this option will allow the plotting of pie ‘slices’, rather than entire pies.

Filled

When making stacked bar or area plots, you can use this option to make every entry sum to 100%.

Colour scheme

Choose the colourmap for plotted entries.

Plot style

Aesthetic changes to the plot: background colour, line size, etc. If using a seaborn style, colours cannot be manually selected.

Legend position

Choose where in the figure the legend should sit, or let it float around with best.

Figure size

Choose dimensions for the figure. Equal dimensions is probably a good idea for pie charts.

Subplot layout

If you’re using the Subplots option, this allows you to specify the grid shape for the canvas as a whole.

Show totals

Try to display aggregates or total percentages on the plot, in the legend, or both.

Interacting with your figure

Once you’ve generated a figure, a toolbar appears beneath it, with options for panning and zooming. The figure is smart enough to reposition the legend depending on the position of the data currently being shown.

You can use this toolbar to save the image to disk. Your project/images directory is a good place for them.

Visualising data with other tools

If you’re more confortable generating visualisations in another tool, you can head to Menu → Manage project to export a CSV version of any interrogations or edited results. This can be imported into Excel, for example.

Viewing other images

You can use the Previous/Next buttons to bring up any images that have been saved in the project/images directory.

Next steps

Through the process of interrogating, editing and visualising, you may find something that sticks out: maybe something is very frequent in a subcorpus, or maybe something is conspicuously absent. The Concordance tab allows you to resuse your Interrogate queries to look at language in co(n)text.