Visual Text Analysis in Digital Humanities

TLDR

Distant Reading, introduced by Franco Moretti in 2005, revolutionized literary analysis by enabling large‑scale examination of entire text collections, contrasting with traditional Close Reading that focuses on individual works, and both approaches underpin Visual Text Analysis. The paper surveys digital humanities research since 2005 on visualizing close and distant reading, classifies studies by a taxonomy of text analysis tasks, illustrates combined techniques for multi‑faceted views, and outlines future challenges. The authors classify studies by a taxonomy of text analysis tasks, categorize close and distant reading techniques, illustrate combined approaches for multi‑faceted views, examine text sources and data transformation steps, and discuss collaboration experiences and future challenges.

Abstract

Abstract In 2005, Franco Moretti introduced Distant Reading to analyse entire literary text collections. This was a rather revolutionary idea compared to the traditional Close Reading, which focuses on the thorough interpretation of an individual work. Both reading techniques are the prior means of Visual Text Analysis. We present an overview of the research conducted since 2005 on supporting text analysis tasks with close and distant reading visualizations in the digital humanities. Therefore, we classify the observed papers according to a taxonomy of text analysis tasks, categorize applied close and distant reading techniques to support the investigation of these tasks and illustrate approaches that combine both reading techniques in order to provide a multi‐faceted view of the textual data. In addition, we take a look at the used text sources and at the typical data transformation steps required for the proposed visualizations. Finally, we summarize collaboration experiences when developing visualizations for close and distant reading, and we give an outlook on future challenges in that research area.