Evoq: a Visualization Tool to Support Structural Analysis of Text Documents

Structural analysis is a text analysis technique that helps uncovering the association and opposition relationships between the terms of a text. It is used in particular in the field of humanities and social sciences. This technique is usually applied by hand with pen and paper as support. However, as any combination of words in the raw text may be considered as an association or opposition relationship, applying the technique by hand in a readable way can quickly prove overwhelming for the analyst. In this paper, we propose Evoq, an application that provides support to structural analysts in their work. Furthermore, we present interactive visualizations representing the relationships between terms. These visualizations help create alternative representations of text, as advocated by structural analysts. We conducted two usability evaluations that showed great potential for Evoq as a structural analysis support tool and for the use of alternative representations of texts in the analysis.