We visualized Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” as a text network and then read it again using Alexis Jacomy’s GexfWalker. Whether it is a new reading of Shakespeare’s classic or a bunch of unrelated words is for you to decide, but at least it allows for polysingularity of text to be expressed more fully through following the word relations while staying loyal to the text’s original structure.
Italo Calvino once said that “writing is essentially a combinatorial exercise” and that “reading is a way of exercising the potentialities contained in the system of signs”. We propose a new way of reading using text network visuaization. It goes beyond the normal sequential organization of textual material and instead offers the reader to navigate through polysingularity of meanings present within the text. Created using Alexis Jacomy’s GexfWalker and Gephi software.
In this research we propose a method for visualizing text’s polysingularity: the multiple clusters of meaning circulation contained within a text. These clusters can be described as “strange attractors” (to use the term from dynamical systems theory), which are actualized during the process of reading. We use network analysis in order to plot the text’s structure onto a two-dimensional plane and represent these strange attractors as the communities of co-occurring nodes, positioned within the graph depending on their influence for the production of meaning.
In this work we propose a method and algorithm for identifying the pathways for meaning circulation within a text. This is done by visualizing normalized textual data as a graph and deriving the key metrics for the concepts and for the text as a whole using network analysis. The resulting data and graph representation are then used to detect the key concepts, which function as junctions for meaning circulation within a text, contextual clusters comprised of word communities (themes), as well as the most often used pathways for meaning circulation.
We are happy to announce our new Text Atlas project. It is now available as a blog on Tumblr and will later be published as a book and presented in exhibition format.