A Visual Approach for the Comparative Analysis of Character Networks in Narrative Texts

Abstract

The analysis of a novel's plot and characters are challenging and time-consuming tasks in literary criticism. Typically, 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. Nowadays, due to the digitization of literature, humanities scholars can be supported in these endeavors with computational methods. In this paper, we present an approach that offers several means to analyze the plot and characters of a novel visually. Analysts can easily switch between an adjacency matrix and a node-link representation, which provide an overview of the characters and the relationships between them. Both views enable analysts to select different text ranges of the novel for studying the commonalities and differences of the character constellations within these ranges. We offer interactive visual representations to help investigate the relationships between the characters in more detail. Additionally, we link the visual representations with the novels' texts to support the inspection and verification of previously generated ideas and hypotheses. To demonstrate the benefits and limitations of our approach, we present two usage scenarios. The first one is based on a fictitious analysis and the second one discusses applications that were carried out during joint workshops with humanities scholars. Finally, we present and discuss the insights gained by an expert study and the design decisions of our approach.