Digital visualization in literary analysis

Prof. Silvia Pokrivčáková, University of Trnava, Slovakia

Abstract: Despite initial resistance from some literary scholars, digital humanities are finding their way into literary scholarship and education. The paper discusses various computational techniques that have been proven productive for expanding literary analysis's scope and capabilities. In addition, it introduces and illustrates possibilities and tools for digital visualization of longer literary texts (as sources of large amounts of data). These tools can effectively support the researchers who analyse and interpret literary texts. Among the greatest benefits of digital visualization belongs the quantity of information that can be rapidly interpreted and the possibility of identifying such properties of the literary text that were not anticipated before. The paper focuses on selected digital humanities methods (tokenization and normalization, named entity recognition, part-of-speech tagging, sequence alignments, and topic modelling algorithms). These allow researchers to visualize corpora of literary texts by producing many different images and views, e.g. in the form of graphs, word clouds, bubble lines, correlations, mandalas, cirrus, scatterplots, links, looms, knots, trends, animations, etc. The paper also illustrates some of these imagining possibilities.

Keywords: digital humanities in literature, data visualisation in literature, digitalized literary analysis, literary education