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Word Vector Interface

This repository is the code base for the Word Vector Interface, a Shiny application for exploring word vector models. The app includes the models generated from the corpus of Women Writers Online.

The Word Vector Interface was created by Jonathan Fitzgerald, whose original repository can be found on GitHub. Parth Tandel continued the application’s development and added many new features and improvements. The Women Writers Project thanks them for their vision and their work on this project!

Running the application

To run the Shiny app on your own machine, you’ll need R, a programming language available at https://www.r-project.org/. RStudio Desktop is recommended but not required.

Getting the code

You’ll also need a copy of the code from this GitHub repository.

The simplest method for obtaining the code is also the simplest way of running the app. In an R console or in RStudio’s console, install the “shiny” package, then use it to run the application using the files published on GitHub.

install.packages("shiny")
library(shiny)
runGitHub("word-vector-interface", "NEU-DSG")

If you plan to do any customization of the code, you should instead download the code yourself. For more information on the components of the app, see the “Application Components” document.

If you do plan to make edits, and want to put those edits under version control, you can clone the repository in the command line.

git clone https://github.com/NEU-DSG/word-vector-interface.git

Alternatively, you can download and decompress this file: https://github.com/NEU-DSG/word-vector-interface/archive/main.zip.

Running a local copy with RStudio

Open RStudio and make sure the following packages are installed:

  • “shiny”
  • “shinydashboard”
  • “shinyjs”
  • “magrittr”
  • “DT”
  • “rjson”
  • “wordcloud”
  • “ggrepel”
  • “tidyverse” (this package has a lot of dependencies and will take a long time to install)
  • Benjamin Schmidt’s “wordVectors”, available at https://github.com/bmschmidt/wordVectors

With the exception of “wordVectors”, these libraries are available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) and can be downloaded by running the following in RStudio’s console window:

install.packages(c("shiny", "shinydashboard", "shinyjs", "magrittr", "DT", "rjson", "tidyverse", "wordcloud", "ggrepel"))

To install “wordVectors”, first install and load “devtools”.

install.packages("devtools")

If “devtools” installed successfully, use it to install “wordVectors” from GitHub.

library("devtools")
devtools::install_github("bmschmidt/wordVectors")

Note: If “devtools” won’t install, use the “remotes” package instead.

install.packages("remotes")
library("remotes")
remotes::install_github("bmschmidt/wordVectors")

With the required libraries present, you can simply open app.R, and select the “Run App” button in RStudio’s editor pane. The application will open in a separate window by default.

Running a local copy with Docker

The Word Vector Interface can be run in a self-contained Docker environment. We recommend against using this option locally—the RStudio method is easier to customize and often quicker to set up.

However, Docker environments have the benefit of being easily reproducible. You might have to wait longer for the Word Vector Interface to start up, but it should start, with all prerequisites taken care of for you. If you’re struggling with running the app in RStudio, try the instructions for running the app with Docker.

Customizing the application

When run, the Word Vector Interface will read in models from the “data” folder, and make them available for querying. Models are only published, however, if (1) they have a corresponding entry in the catalog “data/catalog.json”, and (2) that entry is marked “public”.

To add your own pre-generated model(s), place them in the “data” directory. Then edit “data/catalog.json”. Here's a sample entry:

"WWO Corpus": {
"shortName": "WWO Full Corpus",
"location": "data/wwo_xquery-nonreg_allTexts.bin",
    "shortDescription" : "All texts from WWO",
    "public" : "true",  
"description": "Currently displayed: the entire Women Writers Online corpus of women's writing from 1526 to 1850."

}

Each model in the catalog has a descriptive “short name”, which is used to populate the dropdown menu of queryable models. The “location” field gives a relative filepath to the model’s BIN file. The two description fields can be left as empty strings, since they aren’t yet in use. Finally, the “public” field is marked “true” (if the model should be published in the browser), or “false” (if the model should not be published).

To add your own entries to the catalog, follow the template above, making sure to separate entries with commas. You may also want to change which of the existing models are published to the WVI interface.