Dashboard

Welcome to the Virtual Salon of Constance de Salm (1767–1845)

With this interactive dashboard, you can take the plunge into the correspondence of Constance de Salm, a French female poet and writer of the 18th and 19th century. Basic metadata is taken from the edition project of the Historical German Institute in Paris (Deutsches Historisches Institut Paris, DHIP). The official website includes facsimiles of the aprox. 11,000 documents – mostly letters written from or to Constance de Salm- and further important information on the main projects.
This project focuses on letters written by Constance de Salm. Its main goal is to merge all metadata into a linked open data (RDF) model, to use text mining techniques for semi-automatic information retrieval and to build an interactive knowledge graph that works as a fun gateway to information about the correspondence. On this dashboard, you can get a first impression of certain stats, as well as interact with the latest (reduced) version of the knowledge graph.

This dashboard offers visualisations – including an interactive knowledge graph – about the correspondence of Constance de Salm (1767–1845) that I analysed and worked on for my Master's thesis.
Most Prominent Places of Exposition

Explore the most frequent places of exposition of the letters. Zoom in via the mouse-wheel to get a close-up of the locations on the map.

Find letters by their place of exposition!
Main Addressees

Overview of all addressees Constance de Salm sent letters to. Hovering over a bubble displays the frequency.

Find addressees and their letters!
Letters Sent per Year

Barchart of the amount of letters Constance de Salm sent to other people per year (from 1793–1845). Using the mouse-wheel inside of this chart will zoom in or out on/of the bars to better focus on conrete intervals. You can also download the visualisation (on the top-right, the three dots)!

Exploring the Correspondence Through the Knowledge Graph

101 of Using the Graph Interface
1. Loading the Graph

The knowledge graph will load automatically once you visit this website. Depending on how fast your internet is, or generally on how fast your PC can process data, the graph will take a few seconds less or more. If you want to reload the graph, you can simply click on the button clear (reload graph).
P.S. If the graph is dancing around, this means all the visual information is still being adjusted to the screen. You can already interact with the graph, however, the little dancey dance can be a bit distracting...

2. Interacting With the Graph

There are a few ways you can interact with this graph. Zooming in and out is possible via the mouse-wheel (also used for scrolling, so using the mouse-wheel inside the graph-window will not scroll on the page but instead zoom in/zoom out). Clicking once on a node or relationship will focus its metadata information on the upper-left of the graph window. Right-clicking on it will open the URL in a new tab (for example, this way, you can get to the facsimile of a letter). When you are in the search-view of the graph, double-clicking the nodes will open its context information (other nodes it is connected to). In order to get back to the initial, full-view of the graph, you have to reload the graph.

3. A Special Way of Interacting With the Graph: Search!

In order to search for nodes in the graph, you can type a single-word search term into the search bar and then proceed to click on search in graph. If the search term was found in one or more of the nodes, a new, smaller graph is displayed. Nodes that can be queried this way are addressees, keywords, automatic keywords, dates, sentiments or places of exposition. For keywords, you can search in English, German and French. In the search-view, you can double-click on nodes to show their context. Getting back to the initial, full-view is possible via reloading the graph.
Try searching for terms that interest you, e.g. health or Paris!

More elaborated background information and an overview of the icons and their meaning can be found under F.A.Q.!