Communication is among the most widely ranging of all academic disciplines. Sometimes it seems like the field is interested in everything! Health care, television, marriages, great speeches, advertising, journalism, political campaigning, debate, news gathering, philosophy, ethics, diversity and gender, social movements, history, race relations, personality, media bias, democratic process, public relations, environmentalism, information systems, child development, the process of making meaning, animal interaction, popular culture, education --- the list is huge.

In a field whose subject matter is so inclusive, how can one efficiently discover what topics, ideas, concepts, and variables have received central attention in the field? One way is to use the "Visual Communication Concept Explorer" to explore related concepts from the communication literature. This unique search system can help seasoned communication professionals gain a deeper appreciation of the structure of communication knowledge and it can help newcomers to learn "what goes with what" conceptually. (Students: the Concept Explorer is a great way to generate ideas for research papers!)

Enter any term (e.g., "television", "argument", "cancer", "family", "Internet", etc.) in the concept explorer's search box and press the submit button. Generally, you should select single terms only, not compound words or multiword phrases. However, some important common phrases are handled as such (e.g., freedom of speech, case study, public relations, content analysis, critical theory, spiral of silence, etc.). If you need to search for a compound word or multiword phrase, you may need to experiment. Try the phrase and if results are unsatisfactory, try component words.

In response to your search term, the system will display the constellation of terms that communication scholars have most frequently interrelated with the term you submitted. Concepts more frequently co-occurrencent with your search term are connected by shorter lines. You'll be able to further examine links by selecting terms for use in searching various CIOS databases, such as ComAbstracts, the CIOS Journals Indexes, or ComWeb MegaSearch (note: institutional or individual membership in the CIOS is required to use some CIOS databases, but access to the Concept Explorer itself is open to the general public.)

The following links provide samples of the visual concept explorer in action. Use your borwser's back button to retun to this page after viewing an image.

The Visual Communication Concept Explorer is based on a lexical analysis of the titles of approximately 36,000 articles published in 70 communication journals between 1965 and 2001.

The database was built by parsing the set of article titles into individual words. Next, certain "common words" were eliminated that have no conceptual value ("and", "because", "if", "then", etc.) or that occur with such high frequency as to be indiscriminate ("communication", "effect"). Certain high frequency words that have alternative British spelling were changed to their Americanized equivalent (e.g., "organisation" was changed to "organization"; "colour" was changed to "color", etc.). Remaining words were reduced to their linguistic roots using the Porter stemming procedure. Stemming provides a way for words with similar roots but routine differences in form (e.g., "theory" and "theories"; "organizing" and "organize") to be recognized as equivalent. Some words were excepted that might change meaning when stemmed (e.g., stemming "CRITICAL" to the same root as "CRITIC" loses an important distinction in the way these high frequency words are used by communication scholars). Frequency counts were obtained for stemmed words that appear together in titles.

Because this database is built from the titles of academic research articles, it is ideal for lexical analysis. With relatively few exceptions, titles of academic articles are tightly constructed and feature the major concepts the article addresses. There is considerable wisdom in the tradition in the field of requiring that titles be constructed tightly of meaningful concepts. According to the style manual of the American Psychological Association, which is the predominant style book for the communication field's literature, "A title should summarize the main idea of the paper ... It should be a concise statement of the main topic and should identify the actual variables or theoretical issues under investigation and the relationship between them." Fortunately, adherence to this convention has characterized the field's literature, making it practical to perform meaningful lexical analyses that help in the discovery of nonobvious relationships within the corpus of the field's scholarship.

Timothy Stephen conducted the lexical analysis, authored the server side components of the system, and is the principal designer of the project. The browser applet was programmed by Zhong Zhang. Special thanks are extended to CIOS advisor Professor Sibel Adali for her facilitation of the project and imporant design suggestions.