Abstract

Word frequency statistics and lexical diversity measures can provide insights into discourse differences between texts. The ZipfExplorer, a tool and online app for the interactive visualization and comparison of word frequencies in two texts, shows side-by-side rank-frequency profiles and interactive tables of shared lexis,enabling keyword analysis and shedding light on discourse differences. Four lexical diversity measures (type-token ratio, Gini coefficient, power-law alpha parameter, and Shannon entropy) are calculated for the shared word types. Word frequency information is provided for a selection of mainly literary texts, and users can upload their own files. This paper provides an overview of the visualization of word frequency distributions, describes the functionality of the ZipfExplorer tool and demonstrates some of its features, and briefly discusses the lexical diversity measures calculated by the tool.