This article originally appeared in Issue 4 of Nightingale magazine. (Get your copy here!) This edition of the Data Is Plural visualization challenge prompted readers to explore a dataset of the dialog in works of literary fiction. Check out the submissions:
David Churchman: For this challenge, I wanted to see if I could capture the essence of an entire book, Winnie the Pooh, on one page. I landed on the bee-swarm plot before realizing how apt it was for a book with so much focus on bees and honey, but I ain’t mad about it.
Neil Richards: These images contrast dialogue in two classic books: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Pride and Prejudice. Every piece of dialogue shows the speaker, lists of those addressed, and those mentioned. Pride and Prejudice is noticeably longer, with some lengthier and more complex pieces of dialogue, but with a smaller cast of speaking characters. Interactive versions available online: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Pride and Prejudice.
Eva Filep: This visualization explores the literary genre found in the dataset, designed in a flip-card style where the user switches between the author’s portrait and a summary of the number of books, characters, and quotes contained in the data.
Matthias Stahl: A Room with a View is a classic of world literature. But admittedly I only know the rough outline – not the whole story. The dialogue dataset now opens up the exciting possibility of being able to look into the interactions of the main actors. So, I went on a data journey with Lucy, her mother, Cecil, and George. The patterns paint a much more detailed picture of the dynamics between the characters than I ever imagined.
Georgios Karamanis: This visualization shows the total number of text characters spoken by male and female characters in the 28 novels of the Project Dialogism Novel Corpus, shown as chat bubbles in a chat app.
Ryan Liwag: I wanted to explore a visualization on the sex ratio between character interactions within the novels. This visualization shows the number of times a male/female speaks, while also trying to visualize gender between these interactions. Tools used are D3.js for the heavy lifting and Illustrator for the fine-tuning. Observable notebook for the project available here.
Nina Errey: Mansplaining in the regency period: Here are two categorical scatterplots. Each one presents the first 40 quotes from the female and male protagonists in two Jane Austen novels: Emma and Persuasion. When we compare all quotes from each protagonist, men use the Anaphoric quote type 44% of the time, compared to 16% for women. Considering that Anaphoric means that the speaker is referring to something earlier, it indicates that they are explaining (mansplaining!). Jane Austen has enlightened us to the fact that the tradition of mansplaining is timeless.
Leonora: “Dialog Explorer” is my attempt at creating a visual that shows how different book characters relate to each other and the book text. The interactive version (available here) allows the viewer to see where characters appear in dialogue, their relations, and explore more novels.
Nightingale Editors
Our Nightingale editorial team currently consists of Alejandra Arevalo, William Careri, Jason Forrest, Elijah Meeks, and Teo Popescu. Reach us at Nightingale(at)Datavisualizationsociety.org
