Interactive Music Mapping Vienna: Networks In Time and Space

Abstract

In the application domain of digital humanities network visualization is increasingly being used to conduct research as the main interests of the domain experts lie in exploring and analyzing relationships between entities and their changes over time. Visualizing the dynamics and different perspectives of such data is a non-trivial task but it enables researchers to explore connections between disparate entities and investigate historical narratives that emerge. We present our work on an interactive exploration environment to visualize event-based networks and support research in digital humanities through visualization of historical subjects in space and time. Our approach is a circular visualization that is flexible and transparent to the underlying subject. It uses event-based networks as inputs, considering the existence of a small set of entities in space and time: people, places, events, and themes. This minimal model is powerful enough to represent many facets of historical subjects and explore trends and narratives mainly through their temporal and spatial developments, serving as visual analytical support to humanists.