Exploring dynamic multilayer graphs for digital humanities
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(2020) 5:54
Applied Network Science
RESEARCH
Open Access
Exploring dynamic multilayer graphs for digital humanities Stefan Bornhofen1*
and Marten Düring2
*Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Laboratoire ETIS, CY Cergy Paris Université, ENSEA, CNRS, UMR8051, 33 Boulevard du Port, 95000 Cergy, France Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
Abstract The paper presents Intergraph, a graph-based visual analytics technical demonstrator for the exploration and study of content in historical document collections. The designed prototype is motivated by a practical use case on a corpus of circa 15.000 digitized resources about European integration since 1945. The corpus allowed generating a dynamic multilayer network which represents different kinds of named entities appearing and co-appearing in the collections. To our knowledge, Intergraph is one of the first interactive tools to visualize dynamic multilayer graphs for collections of digitized historical sources. Graph visualization and interaction methods have been designed based on user requirements for content exploration by non-technical users without a strong background in network science, and to compensate for common flaws with the annotation of named entities. Users work with self-selected subsets of the overall data by interacting with a scene of small graphs which can be added, altered and compared. This allows an interest-driven navigation in the corpus and the discovery of the interconnections of its entities across time. Keywords: Visual analytics, Network visualization, Dynamic multilayer networks, Digital humanities
Introduction In recent years, vast quantities of the human cultural records have been digitized, further described with metadata and made available in the form of collections. Such collections within the fields of cultural heritage and digital humanities typically consist of digitized multimedia objects with a strong bias towards unstructured text, metadata of various levels of detail and completeness, and often a layer of named entity annotations. Today, most scholars in the humanities and related disciplines rely on keyword search and faceted search to retrieve relevant content. Any analysis of such collections needs to be based on an understanding of the underlying rationale for the creation of collections, how they are organized and to be able to retrieve relevant content in an exploratory manner (van Ham and Perer 2009; Brown and Greengrass 2006). In this paper we present Intergraph, a technical demonstrator for the exploration of such collections based on named entity linking and collection-inherent metadata as well as the results from preliminary user evaluations. Intergraph was designed to utilise multilayer network visualizations to © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author
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