Visualizing the Dissimilarity of Text Editions

Text Variant Graphs are data structures that model the similarities and differences among various editions of a text. The vertices of these graphs are the tokens of the texts and subsequent tokens are connected to each other. With my Digital Humanities 2014 paper “5 Design Rules for Visualizing Text Variant Graphs” I presented an approach that generates intuitive, well readable layouts for such data structures. The design is implemented in the OpenSource JavaScript library TRAViz (http://traviz.vizcovery.org) that can be used to align small text entities to each other and to visualize the resultant Text Variant Graph in the browser. Currently, I am working on an extension of the proposed design, more specifically, TRAViz will be enriched by several means of interaction to allow for a more instense analysis of the graph and a modification of its underlying alignment structure.

In my project presentation, I will present the final design for Text Variant Graphs and the interaction capabilities provided by TRAViz. Furthermore, we will take a look at various usage scenarios and open issues in this research area.