TransVis: Integrated Distant and Close Reading of Othello Translations

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 reexamining 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.

VNLP: Visible natural language processing

“…The word tree 44 is another kind of directed stream graph used to illustrate the occurrence of terms in a text. Alharbi et al 45 similarly propose an overview of translations that connects aligned segments using curved lines.…”

“…Geng et al 47 implement parallel coordinates of the similarity measures in order to depict the variation between translations. Alharbi et al 45 incorporate parallel line charts to illustrate the terms embeddings that are generated to convey the variation between different texts.…”

Interactive Visual Analysis of Translations

“…In addition, TransVis [2] presented at the digital tools and impact panel hosted by CODAH in 2019. In the third CoS PGR, we first presented the idea of AlignVis [1].…”

“…In 2020, TransVis was published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (IEEE TVCG) [2] and AlignVis was published at the International Conference on Information Visualization (IV). In the same year, Dr. Laramee moved from Swansea University to the University of Nottingham and Professor Cheesman retired from the School of Arts and Humanities.…”

“…History of TransVis: Figure 1.12 illustrates the history of the publication of our milestone paper TransVis [2] (Chapter 6). Many successful publications go through a lengthy submission and review process, yet this story is never told.…”