[Part 4] Exploring a data explorer

The role of data explorer is to provide you with administration capabilities, as well as give a birds-eye view of the annotated data.

Note

The data overview functionality is expected to broaden in Textinator v1.1

Annotation statistics & progress tracking

Textinator provides a birds-eye view of the annotated data and the annotation process. Speficially, it shows the distribution of lengths for each marker that is present in the project (the top left graph in the screenshot below).

For administrative purposes, you can also track the timing per annotation for each annotator (top right graph), their annotation progress and how many texts they chose to skip (bottom left graph), as well the overall sizes of the data sources, as a reminder (bottom right graph). Note that the screenshot is taken from the real-world annotation project, so the names of the data sources and annotators are edited out for privacy reasons. On top of that if annotators flag any texts as problematic, you can also see their comments in the data explorer under the red pane called “Flagged texts” (see example in the screenshot below).

Exporting annotations

Textinator exports data in a custom concise JSON format specifically designed for each annotation task, supported out of the box. You will get data exported in this format if you click on the green “Export to JSON” button (see screenshots in the previous section).

If you have done any customization to an out-of-the-box task, we recommend using a generic export functionality, featuring a generic export format (thus less concise), but including all of your annotation. You can use generic export by clicking the green “Export to JSON (generic)” button.

PDF time report

Textinator is also capable of generating a per-month time report per annotator. Note that this report can NOT be a ground for payments, since Textinator provides only an estimate of the spent time. For instance, the time needed for breaks or potential research connected to the annotation process should also be counted, but is not accounted for in Textinator’s report. The report should be mostly used as a sanity check and if the reported numbers and the real numbers differ by a substantial amount, it’s just a flag to the project manager that this should be investigated further.