Word Space is a 3D frequency visualiser that maps the vocabulary of interview transcripts into a navigable spatial field. Each word from a participant's interview becomes a point in a cube, positioned according to three axes: how often the word appears (height), where it first occurs in the transcript (left-right), and the character of the word itself (depth). The result is a constellation of language that lets the researcher see proximity, distance, and clustering in a participant's vocabulary at a glance.
Z (height): frequency. Words that appear more often rise higher in the cube.
X (left-right): position in the transcript. Words introduced early sit to the left, later words to the right.
Y (depth): word character. Shorter, more common structural words sit at one end, longer, more specific terms at the other.
Colour: each source (participant, researcher memo, or institutional text) has its own hue, matching the chromatic identity used in Palimpsest.
Opacity and size: more frequent words are larger and more opaque.
Stone ring: words shared across multiple participants are circled, marking convergent vocabulary.
Tension arcs: red arcs connect word pairs in theoretical tension (e.g. freedom/constraint), defined by the researcher.
Co-occurrence lines: connect words that frequently appear near each other in the source text.
Temporal tint: cool tones for words introduced early, warm tones for words introduced late.
Journey path: traces the order in which unique words appear, showing the path through the vocabulary space.
Maker: full interface for adding sources, adjusting display, defining tension pairs, and exploring the data.
Examiner: simplified view for a reviewer, with key analytical overlays and export.
Exhibition: kiosk mode for unattended display, with guided tour and attract screen.
Word Space made visible the proximity and distance of terms in a participant's vocabulary. It showed the language of value and the language of documentation sitting far apart in the field, almost never co-occurring, which gave the researcher an early and visual form of the documentation gap later theorised in the thesis, well before the Bourdieusian vocabulary to state it was available.
Like Palimpsest, Word Space is powerful for noticing and poor for proving. A wide separation in the word field is a hypothesis about the coded data, not a finding about it, and the discipline of returning from the instrument to the coded data is part of using it well.
Word Space is one of three research instruments developed as part of a practice-based PhD examining how artist-lecturers navigate Bologna Process soft governance in art and design higher education. The visual encoding system and analytical findings are discussed in Chapter 5 (section 5.3.1) of the thesis.
Instrument by Paul Gardiner, Limerick School of Art and Design / Queen's University Belfast.