Visualizing Harry, Across Fan Fiction:
Line Charts
Information for reading this visualization:
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The two graphs above show how similar in context and use several words are to the word "Harry" across the nine years of fan fiction:
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The first graph shows how similar a given word is to Harry; the higher the word is on the graph, the more similar it is to Harry in a given book.
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The second graph shows where that word falls in the ranking of most similar words; the most similar word to Harry is ranked 0, then 1, then 2, etc. The closer a word is to the bottom of this graph, the more similar it is to Harry.
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You'll notice that these graphs do not look the same: First of all, the most similar words are at the top of the first graph and at the bottom of the second graph. Also, the words generally become more or less similar by book, but how they rank in regards to each other changes drastically, book to book.
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The words in the legend to the right are the words that appeared in at least seven years' lists of the top 100 words most similar to Harry. We chose these words because they would have data points for each spot on the line graph. If you click on any word, it will highlight that word's line in both graphs, and you can choose whether to focus only on that word or discard that word from the version of the graph that you are looking at.
Questions to prompt analysis:
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These words are not necessarily the words that appear at the very top of each of the fan fiction lists, but they are the ones that appeared most consistently. Are you surprised that any of these words appeared most consistently? Are there any words that you would've guessed would be on this list? Are there any words that you're surprised are not here? Why do you feel that way about these words?
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Look at the general shapes of the lines. Are there any trends that words have overall? What do you think might have happened in these years or the creation of the fan fiction that would have caused that trend?
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Try comparing a word's similarity to it's ranking. Does it raise in similarity but move lower down in the list? Or vice versa? What might these contradictory moves mean?
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Is there a word that suddenly changes similarity or ranking? Why do you think it would do that? What is happening in that year that might cause that shift?
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Try and compare two or more words. How do they change in regards to each other? What patterns can you see in how these words change in similarity to Harry?
So, what did you find? Leave a comment to tell us what you thought and check out what others have been seeing!
If you have any questions on how to read this chart, check out the How To on this particular page here.