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Abstract
The study of novels and the analysis of their plot, characters and other information entities are complex and time-consuming tasks in literary science. The digitization of literature and the proliferation of electronic books provide new opportunities to support these tasks with visual abstractions. Methods from the field of computational linguistics can be used to automatically extract entities and their relations from digitized novels. However, these methods have known limitations, especially when applied to narrative text that does often not follow a common schema but can have various forms. Visualizations can address the limitations by providing visual clues to show the uncertainty of the extracted information, so that literary scholars get a better idea of the accuracy of the methods. In addition, interaction can be used to let users control and adapt the extraction and visualization methods according to their needs. This paper presents ViTA, a web-based approach that combines automatic analysis methods with effective visualization techniques. Different views on the extracted entities are provided and relations between them across the plot are indicated. Two usage scenarios show successful applications of the approach and demonstrate its benefits and limitations. Furthermore, the paper discusses how uncertainty might be represented in the different views and how users can be enabled to adapt the automatic methods.
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Notes
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A video and demo of the web implementation are available athttp://textvis.visualdataweb.org.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our students Sanjeev Balakrishnan, Felix Do, Sebastian Frank, Paul Kuznecov, Vincent Link, Eduard Marbach, Jan Melcher, Christian Richter, Marc Weise, and Marvin Wyrich who implemented the approach in a student project. This work has partly been funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as part of the ‘ePoetics’ project and as part of the Center for Reflected Text Analysis ‘CRETA’ at University of Stuttgart.
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Authors and Affiliations
Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems (VIS), University of Stuttgart, Universitätsstraße 38, 70569, Stuttgart, Germany
Markus John, Steffen Koch, Michael Wörner & Thomas Ertl
Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS), Schloss Birlinghoven, 53757, Sankt Augustin, Germany
Steffen Lohmann
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Correspondence toMarkus John.
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Escola Superior de Tecnologia do IPS, Setúbal, Portugal
José Braz
MiraLab, University of Geneva, Carouge, Switzerland
Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann
LISA - ISTIA, University of Angers, Angers, France
Paul Richard
Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany
Lars Linsen
University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
Alexandru Telea
Università di Catania, Catania, Italy
Sebastiano Battiato
Research Innovation Center, Canon U.S.A. Inc., San Jose, California, USA
Francisco Imai
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John, M., Lohmann, S., Koch, S., Wörner, M., Ertl, T. (2017). Visual Analysis of Character and Plot Information Extracted from Narrative Text. In: Braz, J.,et al. Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications. VISIGRAPP 2016. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 693. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64870-5_11
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