🤖 AI Summary
Existing narrative visualization approaches are often limited to timelines depicting character–location co-occurrences, struggling to represent deeper narrative structures such as focalization and causality. This work introduces the literary concept of focalization into narrative visualization in a systematic manner, proposing a novel method to model how characters perceive, participate in, observe, or narrate events. Accompanying this conceptual advance is an interactive tool that enables seamless integration of textual content and visual representation. By synthesizing narratological modeling, information visualization design, and interactive techniques, the approach was qualitatively evaluated by four writers and scholars, who found it effective for drafting reflection and literary analysis. The method significantly enhances understanding of narrative perspective differences, offering creators and researchers an analytical dimension absent in traditional approaches.
📝 Abstract
Visualizing narratives is useful to writers to reflect on unfinished drafts and identify unintentional biases and inconsistencies. Literary scholars can use the visualizations to identify nuanced patterns and literary styles from written text. Current narrative visualization is limited to representing character and location co-occurrences in a timeline, omitting important and complex narrative components such as focalization, causality, and speech. This paper aims to capture and visualize underexplored, complex narrative components as a basis for narrative visualization. As a starting point, we propose a new narrative visualization, named FocalLens, that uses focalization, the component that establishes who sees or perceives the events in a narrative, for representing the narrative. We provide the theoretical foundation of focalization and describe various types and facets of focalization. The details are incorporated in the novel visualization that captures how different characters perceive an event, who directly participate in an event, who indirectly observe the event, and who narrate the event. We also developed a tool that provides fluid interaction between the text and the proposed visualization. The tool was evaluated with four writers and scholars in a qualitative study, where writers analyzed their draft stories and scholars analyzed well-known stories. The findings suggest the tool added a new dimension to the workflow for writers and scholars, an analytical lens that is not available otherwise. We conclude by identifying design implications and future directions.