Abstract
In this paper we are concerned with how visualizations can support exploratory corpus and text analysis. We start by giving an overview ofprevious work in information visualization that is based on language data. We discuss how existing approaches differ from our approach . The core of the present article consists of a detailed presentation offive visualization components that we have designedfor supporting the undirected exploratory analysis of text material. For each component we point out possible application contexts and motivations for the design choices and how they are related to established visualization principles. We conclude with a short discussion on future needs for the field of linguistic information visualization.