Visual Analytics for Narrative Text - Visualizing Characters and their Relationships as Extracted from Novels

The study of novels and the analysis of their plot, characters and other entities are time-consuming and complex 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 fields of computational linguistics can be used to automatically extract entities and their relations from digitized novels, which can then be visualized to ease exploration and analysis tasks. This paper presents 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.