Close and distant reading via named entity network visualization: A case study of Women Writers Online

Screenshot of the WWOVis tool.
Three linked visualizations showing a named entity network queried from the Women Writers Online textbase. Left: a beeswarm visualization of the genre of each publication by year. Middle: a bipartite node-link visualization of the top 20 named entities connected to the genres of texts they reside in. Right: a list of texts that include at least one top 20 named entity, ordered alphabetically and linked to the full text. Marks are colored categorically by genre. Empty circles show texts that do not include any of the top 20 named entities.
Abstract
Close reading and distant reading are widely used in digital humanities and can benefit from information visualizations. Digital humanities scholars have curated numerous TEI-encoded textual collections which provide the data necessary for blending both close and distant reading – however we do not have tools to support general users in conducting these blended analyses. In this paper we focus on one such collection: Women Writers Online (WWO). We contribute the design and implementation of a multiple coordinated view network visualization to facilitate close and distant reading in WWO and a transparent view into our iterative design process to help guide future designers and humanists in applying our approach to other textual collections.
Materials
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Authors
Sarah Campbell
Zheng-yan Yu
Sarah Connell
Citation
Thumbnail image for publication titled: Close and distant reading via named entity network visualization: A case study of Women Writers Online
Close and distant reading via named entity network visualization: A case study of Women Writers Online

Sarah Campbell, Zheng-yan Yu, Sarah Connell, and Cody Dunne. Proc. 3rd Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities—VIS4DH. 2018.

PDF | Homepage | Code | Demo Video | BibTeX


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