Exploratory Swedish text analysis using notebooks – a smörgårdsbord of basic corpus linguistic insights

Abstract

The computational notebook has established itself as a significant tool for conducting exploratory data analysis, which aims at investigating characteristics of a dataset without preformulated expectations. Computational notebooks are a type of interactive document, that supports mixing prose, executable code and its output, such as a calculated result, a table, or a graphic. Data, process, and narrative are effectively integrated into one environment, which makes notebooks ideal for documenting exploratory research. Notebooks also facilitate sharing research in a reproducible way for teaching, collaboration or dissemination. This chapter demonstrates basic exploratory techniques for Swedish text analysis implemented as Jupyter notebooks, a popular computational notebook implementation. Using a selection of documents from a Swedish corpus of COVID-19-related materials, we show some of the kinds of text analysis that can easily be performed using readily available software libraries. The examples in this chapter rely only on automatic annotation, requiring minimal manual processing.