What Shakespeare Taught Us About Text Visualization

In our work we have developed text visualization tools to meet the needs of literary scholars. While our work in this domain may on the surface seem quite different from other text visualization applications, we have encountered principles that generalize and will be useful for text data as distant from literature as social media. The way that digital humanities scholars use and argue about texts are not idiosyncratic to their field: their requirements and rhetoric offer implications for design generally, including renewed focus on outliers, constant connection from visualizations to underlying texts, and the ability to generate explanations for higher level patterns by moving back and forth between these patterns and low-level data.