Ventsislav Ikoff (1), Alessio Cardillo (1), Laura Fólica (1), and Diana Roig Sanz (2),(1)
1 Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) – Universitat Oberta de Catalunya – Barcelona, Spain
2 Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) – Barcelona, Spain
Summary
Ventsislav IKOFF, Alessio CARDILLO, Laura FÓLICA, and Diana Roig SANZ present a methodology of displaying literary translation within periodicals published in Ibero-America during the first half of the 20th century. The research focuses on the heterogeneity of the authors, literatures, and languages that were translated, in order to explore how foreign literature circulated during the modernism and avant-garde periods. The presenters propose a “composite visualization” comprising a dynamic geographical visualization using Nodegoat and a nested Sankey diagram, both representing the same data. A focus is laid on the metadata for each contribution, including the author’s country of origin or nationality, the place where the magazine was published, and the original language. Different techniques are employed to visualize the relationships between languages, magazines, and the authors’ country of origin as a weighted network embedded into space. They reflect how different visualizations can influence and determine the perspective taken on the data.
Keywords
translation studies, composite visualization
Feedback
Keith ANDREWS remarks that decent annotation or a descriptive legend for plots of any kind is of prime importance. Moreover, he states that, even though there are great benefits to dynamic graphics with active notions, there is a threshold at which they become irritating and thus detrimental to the visual task. Instead of relying on third-party-software, ANDREWS proposes using customized JavaScript libraries (e.g., D3.js), and in doing so, perhaps including a chord diagram.
Linda FREYBERG emphasizes the minimal requirements of advanced visualizations, such as a sharp and clean separation of text and image elements that should only overlap intentionally. She favors the presenters’ approach for dynamic visuals that naturally exhibit notions of movement and underlines her opinion with an example provided in the video “Charting culture”. However, special attention should be laid on the question of what purpose the stacking of multiple visualizations fulfills.
Tiziana ALOCCI remarks on specific features of individual visualizations, such as being attentive towards thickness of edges as they may reflect the nature of (meta)data parameters. Moreover, she scrutinizes missing data points for individual rows, and how ambiguity or incompleteness in the data is reflected in the visualization. Both ANDREWS and ALOCCI recommend using Rawgraphs as an entry point to more non-conventional visualization types, and as a means of prototyping.
Florian WINDHAGER agrees on the importance of having a specific audience in mind. Given that the final composite view will be static, he proposes the option of showing dynamic networks with ‘Graph Comics’. While he admits that “one view is not enough”, he is playing with the idea of better integrating the composite view in a more dynamic environment, such as in a customizable dashboard.
Slides
Resources
- Bach, Benjamin, Natalie Kerracher, Kyle Wm. Hall, Sheelagh Carpendale, Jessie Kennedy, and Nathalie Henry Riche. ‘Telling Stories about Dynamic Networks with Graph Comics’. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 3670–82. San Jose California USA: ACM, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858387.
- Charting Culture, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gIhRkCcD4U.
- Ijeoma, Ekene. ‘The Refugee Project’. https://therefugeeproject.org.
- RAWGraphs. https://www.rawgraphs.io/.
- D3.js - Data-Driven Documents. https://d3js.org/.