A visual programming environment should encourage the researcher to think about the transformations they subject a text to and it should allow the researcher to keep an accurate record of how their analysis produced the results they find significant. What are the limitations of this prototype. This prototype while it works, was not designed to be a distributable product. More importantly we have in the process of prototyping discovered limitations to the design that would have to be fixed in any full development project. We will discuss these limitations.
Visualization raises a collection of issues around what it means to represent textual information.
In the case of textual visualization we are interpreting and re-presenting a text not through further texts, but through images and diagrams. The computer now allows us to do this automatically, in the sense that the diagram is generated based on measurements of the original text or corpus. Illustrations of texts created by artists do not have the direct connection to the original text, though they might be more illuminating. What the direct connection between the diagram and the text allows us to do is design diagrams that are interactive - that can respond immediately to researcher. That said, there is much work to be done determining how to best measure or quantify texts for graphical representation.