Word Vector Interface, 2023-09-29

This version of the Word Vector Interface represents a thorough refactoring of the R code behind the application.

The code has been improved in a number of small ways to aid maintainability:

• Variables were renamed to better reflect their contents;
• Repeated code has been abstracted out into functions;
• Comments were added to explain parts of the code and to signpost major sections; and
• HTML content has been moved into templates.

Other significant changes:

• We added a version of the catalog with only two models. This is useful for running the WVI app on computers without a lot of resources, or for adding your own custom models.
• We added the “Pair Plot” to the Visualization tab. The pair plot takes two input words and generates a plot of the words most similar to them. This visualization was taken from our “Word Vectors Visualization” tutorial.
• We removed the “Query Term Scatterplot” and “Cluster Scatterplot” visualizations.
• We updated the Clusters tab:
  • Each model's clusters persist, even when the number of words is increased or the model is changed. You can still use the “Reset clusters” buttons to get a new set of 10 clusters.
  • The column headings include the cluster number, out of the 150 generated for the selected model.
  • The downloaded CSVs also have these headers, so you can easily get to a cluster you were interested in.
• We added a slider to control the number of words returned in the Operations tab.
• We tweaked some of the dashboard components to ensure that they stay legible and usable on smaller screens.
• We also improved color contrast in several areas, including the header.
• We fixed the hamburger menu button so that it actually does display the Women Writers Vector Toolkit navigation menu when toggled open.
• We also created resources for building a Docker image of the Word Vector Interface, greatly simplifying the work needed to get the app running. (The app at lab.wwp.northeastern.edu uses this setup.)

Word Vector Interface, 2022-07-20

This release includes modest improvements for the legibility of the web application, and for maintaining the R code itself:

• Added Markdown documentation on maintaining the Shiny app.
• Added comments outlining the structure of the R script.
• Gave more room to the input fields in the Operations tab, with thanks to @zhangan99 for the suggestion!
• Updated site navigation to reflect changes to the Women Writers Vector Toolkit.
• Cleared some deprecation warnings around tibble usage.
• Fixed errors when performing vector addition, multiplication, and division.

Word Vector Interface, 2021-09-15

This release refactors the Shiny application to use R packages at updated versions, making the app suitable for plug-and-play experimentation with word vector models. A condensed version of the app is available below.

This release also adds the ability to pass proxy URLs to Women Writers Online, as well as many styling tweaks and small bug fixes.