Character-Centric Literary Visualisation for Casual Discussion and Analysis
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2024
Open Access
Copyright Clearance Process
- Recently Added
- In Progress
- Open Access
This item is open access.
Casual reading communities, like book clubs, can benefit from tools that facilitate character recall and narrative reflection. However, existing resources – such as wikis, social media, other
text-based repositories, or even handwritten notes – can lack an integrated format that enables all participants to access a unified presentation of both overview and detailed information, during live discussions. Moreover, current literary visualisation techniques are often designed for expert workflows, and methods for abstracting and extracting data types from unstructured text are still in development. To address these gaps, this research describes the design and evaluation of a character-centric literary visualisation technique, across two studies, aimed at enriching casual book discussions for non-expert readers. Study I involved an interview with a literary expert and investigation of relevant literature, which helped identify essential textual features that support character and story understanding – particularly for non-experts in literary analysis. This led to the identification of three types of character dynamics – temporal, social, and personal – and the creation of Clover Connections, a visualisation technique that integrates storylines, social networks, and clover-shaped glyphs to encode these dynamics in a singular layout. Findings from a task-based evaluation demonstrated the visualisation's effectiveness for supporting general character analysis tasks, while qualitative feedback highlighted areas for refinement. Study II enhanced the visualisation by adding plot and genre markers to contextualise character journeys, along with new features for customising the layout and exploring or editing textual data. A new evaluation approach, coined a book-club scenario focus group methodology, was developed to capture richer qualitative insights. This enabled the collection of multimodal data on non-experts’ discussions of a pre-read novel and their explorations of unread novels using four different Clover Connections visualisations. A grounded theory analysis of the data produced a theory on how non-experts integrate casual literary visualisations into book discussions. Synthesising findings from both studies yielded a deeper understanding of the casual literary visualisation design pipeline. This work articulates four key dimensions of interaction variability that influence the effectiveness and usefulness of casual literary visualisations for end-users. The major contribution of this thesis is a character-centric literary visualisation technique, tested with datasets from six novels. Other contributions include insights into developing visualisations tailored for casual literary analysis and broader implications for non-expert-targeted visualisation designs. Promising directions for future work include the exploration of genre-specific visualisations, enhanced character relationship encodings, and distributed approaches to casual literary analysis.
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: