AnnotateVis: Combining Traditional Close Reading with Visual Text Analysis

Close reading is an important research method to analyze and interpret text in traditional humanities research. In the last decades, a huge amount of historical texts have been made available due to large scale digitization projects and facilitated distant reading methods. In the last decade, a number of visualization techniques were developed that support distant reading tasks as they aid to explore large text collections. But, less work has been done to improve the close reading capabilities of humanities scholars, and the majority of existing techniques are either advanced text viewers highlighting textual features, or they are specific to particular research tasks. We propose the close reading tool AnnotateVis that supports the annotation of text fragments with various media types (audio, video, images, etc.). In addition, a user can perform various text analysis methods for a desired text snippet, and the results can be annotated in the form of an interactive visualization. To illustrate the utility of AnnotateVis, we provide two close reading scenarios.