The “multinodal indices” are tools to navigate the underlying bibliographical data of this website. They are built by extracting keywords from the summaries present in the bibliography. Keywords are ranked by co-occurrence in other summaries that contain the same keyword, and by strength as measured by the number of occurrences in a given reference. Then they are plotted as a force-directed graph.
This visualization permits the user to explore connections that are implicit in the data, but not explicitly coded in the form of notes or hyperlinks. The keyword search function navigates the lateral connections that exist when the same keywords are used by a group of authors. The author search function intially returns the “keyword space” of a given author, and links to other authors who use the same keyword in their works. Most elements are clickable, returning more information or direct links to the relevant bibliographic entry.
The author comparison visualization overlays two authors over the entire “keyword space” that represents all authors contained in the bibliography. It can give an indication of how completely an author covers the entire space, and how closely two authors’ interests intersect. It is important to note that this representation is based only on the bibliographical material present on this site: therefore, it does not accurately represent the actual content of the author’s body of work, but only the subset present on this site, filtered through the lens of the scholar who summarized the work(s) in the bibliography. When the comparative tool indicates an interesting intersection or non-intersection of two authors, follow the bibliographical links for the context in which to interpret the results.
Please note that these indices can take a few seconds to load, depending on internet connection speed.
The visualization software was developed in collaboration with Blevmore Labs.
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