Using Divitext and Treeview

It is highly recommended that you use Google Chrome or Firefox. Divitext and Treeview may not be stable in Internet Explorer or other browsers.

Using Divitext

  1. Make sure that you have the text saved as list of tokens in a plain text (.txt) file. Special characters and punctuation will cause Divitext to crash.
  2. Open Divitext. In the bottom left corner, click Upload/Download and select Upload New Text. Click Browse and find your text file. Select your text file and click Upload.
  3. Once the text is uploaded, it will appear in the upper left corner of the Text Manager. Click on the text to “build” it. After you do this, the text will appear in the main Visual Cutter window.
  4. There are many options to chunk the text. A good way to start is to click Advanced in the bottom right corner of the Cutting Tools window. Enter 1000 (or however many words you want in your chunks), and click Cut. You chunks will appear in the Chunk Viewer at the top right of the screen.
  5. In the Chunk Viewer, you may click on any chunk to view the beginning of the chunk. This is how you can work out what text is in a given chunk.
  6. If you are satisfied with your chunking, you need to save the chunkset. At the bottom of the screen, give it a descriptive name or use the supplied one; then click Save Chunkset.
  7. If you are comparing more than one text, repeat the process for multiple texts.
  8. When have finished the process above, click Merge Chunksets in the bottom left corner of the screen. A new dialog window will open showing all of your chunksets. Drag them from the Available Chunksets side of the window to the Merged Chunksets side of the window. If you have more than one, they will be merged into a single file.
  9. Make sure the Transpose checkbox is checked, give the file a descriptive name, and click Download Merge. This will download your chunksets as a tab-separated value (.tsv) file. Treeview will generate a dendrogram from this file.

Changing the Dendrogram Labels

Divitext automatically generates labels for the dendrogram which are not always useful. The easiest way to change them is to open the .tsv file in Excel or another spreadsheet program. (You can do it in any text editor, but it will not be as easy to read.). If you open the file in Excel, you may get a prompt to check that the columns are correct. Just click Finish. You will see the labels in the leftmost column, and you can change them to whatever you want. Save the file in the same format (.tsv). Then launch Treeview.

You may also change labels to an already generated dendrogram. See the advanced instructions for Treeview.

Using Treeview

Open Treeview. Make sure the Merged TSV radio button is selected. Click Browse and select your .tsv file.

  1. Give your dendrogram a title.
  2. In the Clustering Output Type menu, select Phyloxml. This will generate the dendrogram on the screen. Click the Get Dendro button.
  3. If the resulting dendrogram is not a good size, use the height and width sliders to change it. Sometimes a branch will be missing from the image on the screen. If this is the case, generating a PDF version will show the missing branch.
  4. To generate a PDF version of the dendrogram select PDF in the Clustering Output Type menu. Then click the Get Dendro button and a PDF file of your dendrogram will be downloaded to your computer.

Advanced Usage (Optional)

  1. Clicking the Download XML button will download a version of your dendrogram in XML format. The schema is not TEI, but Phyloxml–a schema specifically designed for phylogenetic trees. But it’s pretty easy to read.
  2. In a text editor, open the XML file. You will see that every branch has a <name> and a <description> element. The text in the <name> element is used to generate the label on the dendrogram. If you wish to change a label, change this text and re-save the file. Next, in Treeview, select the PhyloXML radio button and click Browse. Select your text and then click the Get Dendro button. The new dendrogram will have your new label.
  3. The <description> element contains the text “___”. If you replace this with something else, it will appear in the title attribute of the branch label in Treeview. This is a bit confusing, but remember that Treeview is a web page, so it is coded in HTML. Each label in the dendrogram looks like <span title=”___”>Label Name</span>. So whatever appears in the title element will appear in a tooltip when you run your mouse over the label. So, if you put “This is important” in the <description> element of a branch in the XML file, when you run your mouse over the resulting dendrogram. You will get a tooltip that says, “This is important.” You cannot include this comment in the project you submit (unless you submit the XML file), but you may find that adding such annotations helps you to make sense of the dendrograms.

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