Clover Connections: Visualising Character Dynamics in Novels for Non-Experts
Natalie House, Andrew Johnston · 2023
Many literature enthusiasts join communities to discuss their favourite fictional characters and novels, but meaningful insights may be slow to achieve and share when attempting to recall or verify the textual basis of their personal perspectives. Information visualisations can present text-derived data to make its summarisation and exploration both accessible and intuitive, yet visualisations of literary works are mostly tailored to expert workflows. This design study addresses this gap, comprehensively detailing our process of uncovering the tasks, data, and visual design requirements to implement Clover Connections, a visualisation of text-derived data for non-experts. Its layout features clover-shaped glyphs, storylines, and arcs to visually represent and connect temporal, social and personal data on characters in novels, which we demonstrate using datasets built from two popular novels. A formative user evaluation study with non-expert participants showed Clover Connections supports multiple general character analysis tasks, and provided qualitative insights that encourage future work.