Methods and Visualization Tools for the Analysis of Medical, Political and Scientific Concepts in Genealogies of Knowledge

An approach to establishing requirements and developing visualization tools for scholarly work is presented which involves, iteratively: reviewing published methodology, in situ observation of scholars at work, software prototyping, analysis of scholarly output produced with the support of text visualization software, and interviews with users. This approach is embodied by the software co-designed by researchers working on the Genealogies of Knowledge project. This paper describes our co-design methodology and the resulting software, presenting case studies demonstrating its use in test analyses, and discussing methodological implications in the context of the Genealogies of Knowledge corpus-based approach to the study of medical, scientific, and political concepts.