Visualization of Narrative Structure. Analysis of sentiments and character interaction in fiction
University of California, Berkeley, (2013)Abstract
In this work, we visualized two aspects of narrative structure: character interactions and relative emotional trajectory. We performed the analysis for three different books: The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, and The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. We visualize character relationships in a dynamic graph that displays the evolution of connections between characters throughout the book. We show emotional polarity and intensity in a color-coded sentiment bar plot that provides access to the original text. The emotional path of each character through the book can be traced by selecting a character, which highlights the sentences in the sentiment plot where this character appears. Our result is a visualization that provides an at-a-glance impression of the book as well as a method for exploring the plot details. We hope that this method of visual book summarization will be useful both for commercial applications such as book shopping or e-readers, as well as for succinct literary analysis.