“O where is Romeo, saw you him to day?”: Using sonification and visualization in the exploration of Early English literature metadata

Conference item : Poster

We present work in progress concerning the exploration of metadata using visualization and sonification using data from the Bodleian Library’s First Folio and the Early English Books Online (EEBO) projects. We will discuss our exploration of textual metadata from works encoded using Text Encoding Initiative XML. From exploring speakers in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet using visualization and sonification to comparing editorial variations of the text using sonification, we explore the representation of the data for users who are less familiar with the work. We will discuss going from a sparse visual overview to representations with more meaning derived from the underlying metadata. Using the metadata for textual exploration provides issues using plays when the context in the data is not represented, such as gender or class representations in the texts. We will also discuss a search application using the EEBO catalogue to represent the abundance of search terms in bibliographic data. We consider some of our future work in which the same concept, such as a timeline, alters if different senses are used and how the intended audience affects the choice of representation. We conclude by contrasting our experiences.

Authors: Emsley, I

• Publication date: 2016-03-31
• Event title: Digital Visualisation in the Humanities colloquium
• Event location: Whiteknights Campus, University of Reading, UK
• Event website: http://blogs.reading.ac.uk/virtual-rome/2016/01/15/digital-visualisation-colloquium
• Event start date: 2016-03-31
• Event end date: 2016-03-31
• Language: English
• Keywords: visualisation; sonification
• Subtype: Poster