Text2Landscape

An R markdown notebook

The core of this repository is an Rmd notebook that allows you to transform a corpus of texts to a landscape by the tools of computer linguistics, statistics and data visualization packages. Download it and open it in RStudio or VSCode to experiment with the code, or to apply it to your own corpus. Forks and pull requests are welcome!

▸ See the DOCUMENTATION.

Introduction

You will find no realistic landscapes prior to the Renaissance. The saints of medieval murals float in a conceptual space informed by hierarchies and symbolic relations; so do those of the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras. The word "landscape" appears with the Dutch painters of the 15th century. A landscape is a part of the world perceived by a human being at a given moment; an arrangement of features and shapes in a limited space. The Dutch were focused on natural landscapes. Late 20th-century urbanism deals with urban landscapes.

A text can be transformed into a landscape by the tools of computer linguistics, statistics and data visualization packages. Here we work with the example of three texts by the French geographer, writer and anarchist Élisée Reclus: Histoire d'une Montagne, Histoire d'un ruisseau and L'Anarchie.

Visualize the frequencies

The Text as a Network of Word Co-occurrence

Calculate the feature co-occurrence matrix

Visualise the graph

3D variant

Self-organizing map from network

From the feature-coocurrence matrix to a positional matrix with multidemensional scaling

From MDS to SOM

The biofabric layout

Word Embeddings

Principal Component Analysis

Self-organizing Map