Visualization of Narrative Structure

Can books be summarized through their emotional trajectory and character relationships? Can a graphic representation of a book provide an at-a-glance impression and an invitation to explore the details?

We visualized character interactions and relative emotional content for three very different books: a haunting memory play, a metaphysical mood piece, and a children's fantasy classic. A dynamic graph of character relationships displays the evolution of connections between characters throughout the book. Emotional strength and valence of each sentence are shown in a color-coded sentiment plot. Hovering over the sentence bars reveals the text of the original sentences. The emotional path of each character through the book can be traced by clicking on the character names in the graph. This highlights the corresponding sentences in the sentiment plot where that character appears. Click on the links below to see each visualization.

Best viewed in Google Chrome.

Created by Natalia Bilenko (contact) and Asako Miyakawa (contact).