Exploring Patient Organization Periodicals with the Topic Timelines Text Visualization Method

Abstract

The text visualization technique Topic Timelines offers a compact visualization to represent the evolution and clustering of topics over time, while also providing direct access to the texts in which these topics appear. In this paper, we describe how Topic Timelines was further developed within the ActDisease project, by adding functionality for generating timelines using different types of topic extraction techniques and connecting the visualization to existing interfaces for the close reading of texts. Additionally, we evaluate how the updated temporal topic overview can support corpus exploration. The experiments were conducted on a digitalized corpus from the ActDisease project, consisting of patient organization periodicals from the Swedish Diabetes Association, published between 1949 and 1990. Timelines were generated based on topics extracted using sentence transformers clustering and integrated with the ActDisease text database interface - a user interface developed for exploring and reading texts digitalized within the project.