Word Space maps the vocabulary of interview transcripts into a navigable three-dimensional field. Each word from a participant's interview becomes a point in a cube, positioned by how often the word appears (height), where it first occurs in the transcript (left to 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.
The instrument showed the language of value and the language of documentation sitting far apart in the field, almost never co-occurring. This 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. Click any word to pin a card showing its frequency, focused codes, and sentence context. Click to highlight the same word across all five participants, revealing shared and divergent vocabulary.
Tension arcs connect word pairs in theoretical tension, defined by the researcher with thesis references. Co-occurrence lines, temporal tinting, journey paths, and a silences view (hapax legomena and absent institutional terms) provide further analytical overlays. Three modes (Maker, Examiner, Exhibition) serve different use contexts.
Thesis reference: section 3.5.3 (design), section 5.3.1 (contribution). Technical construction: Appendix C.