ABSTRACT
This chapter looks in depth at the topic of visualisation in corpus-based discourse studies. It describes what a data visualisation is. The chapter explains some of the pitfalls associated with traditional ways to present language data and discusses how the output of corpus software tools has to some degree prevented researchers from using more revealing data visualisation approaches. It explores some influential papers on the topic of data visualisation that can help researchers to become more aware of its importance and guide them in their selection and use of different visualisation methods. The chapter also describes a case study of data visualisations that are commonly used in corpus-based discourse studies, revealing their weaknesses and showing how they can be improved. However, in the case of clusters and collocate pairs, it can be useful to visualise the dispersion of these items through individual corpus texts in the same way that the dispersion of individual words is visualised.
