background: humanities scholars want to describe and compare characters’ personality traits, their roles, their relationships, and the evolution of these aspects over the course of a novel.

goal: analyze the plot and characters of a novel visually.

basic question: Support humanities scholars’ analysis about investigating and comparing character constellations at different timestamps of the plot.

detail questions:

1. The visual approach should enable users to select different ranges of a text document and it should visually represent the character networks described within them.
2. It should support a comparison mode that enables users to compare selected character networks with each other to highlight the differences and commonalities of them.
3. The character network visualization should be equipped with interactive features to facilitate the focus- ing and filtering of different parts of the network, for example, to highlight characters that only occur in one of the selected ranges.
4. The approach should provide suitable visual comparison rep- resentations for smaller and larger character networks.
5. The character network representations should be linked to a text view, which enables a close reading approach.
6. It should be possible to analyze the relationships between characters in more detail, for example, to show a textual summarization of their contexts.
7. The visual approach should also provide a similarity overview of all selected character networks that serve as a starting point for a more in-depth analysis.

visual design:

1. node-link

2. Adjacency matrix

   

3. Grid View