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TransVis: Integrated Distant and Close Reading of Othello Translations

journalArticle

DOI:10.1109/TVCG.2020.3012778
Authors: Alharbi Mohammad / Laramee Robert S / Cheesman Tom

Extracted Abstract:

—Studying variation among time-evolved translations is a valuable research area for cultural heritage. Understanding how and why translations vary reveals cultural, ideological, and even political influences on literature as well as author relations. In this paper, we introduce a novel integrated visual application to support distant and close reading of a collection of Othello translations. We present a new interactive application that provides an alignment overview of all the translations and their correspondences in parallel with smooth zooming and panning capability to integrate distant and close reading within the same view. We provide a range of filtering and selection options to customize the alignment overview as well as focus on specific subsets. Selection and filtering are responsive to expert user preferences and update the analytical text metrics interactively. Also, we introduce a customized view for close reading which preserves the history of selections and the alignment overview state and enables backtracing and re-examining them. Finally, we present a new Term-Level Comparisons view (TLC) to compare and convey relative term weighting in the context of an alignment. Our visual design is guided by, used and evaluated by a domain expert specialist in German translations of Shakespeare. Index Terms—Text visualization, Othello, Parallel Translations. F 1

Level 1: Include/Exclude

  • Papers must discuss situated information visualization* (by Willet et al.) in the application domain of CH.
    *A situated data representation is a data representation whose physical presentation is located close to the data’s physical referent(s).
    *A situated visualization is a situated data representation for which the presentation is purely visual – and is typically displayed on a screen.
  • Representation must include abstract data (e.g., metadata).
  • Papers focused solely on digital reconstruction without information visualization aspects are excluded.
  • Posters and workshop papers are excluded to focus on mature research contributions.
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