Here's where things start to get interesting. You can access several different kinds of visualizations depending on what you want to compare. We have 17 different corpora: one that includes all 7 novels, one that includes all 450 pieces of fan fiction, then one for each book and each year of fan fiction. You can get different information depending on which corpora you look at and how you compare them. Here, you have four choices:

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1. Across Rowling's 7 books: this option allows you to see how a character changes over time within Rowling's own series. Considering that our main characters grow up and we learn information that drastically changes the way we understand other major characters, this comparison might help you track that difference and see how Rowling understood it.

2. Across the 9 years of fan fiction: much like the options across the books, this option allows you to study how things change over the nine years of fan fiction that we've gathered. All of the fan fiction was released after the book series was finished, so instead of looking at how characters age, you might be able to find trends that appear at different times within the fandom. For example, there was a good deal of crossover between Harry Potter and the Avengers in 2012. This allows you to just look at the changes in how fans are talking about your selected character.

3. Between book and fan fiction: this option will compare the books over all to the fan fiction over all. Here, you can start looking at consistent differences in how Rowling and fans talk about these characters, as a whole.

4. Compared to other characters: this option will allow you to compare all 7 characters in the corpus that includes all 7 novels or all 450 pieces of fan fiction. This can be useful if you're interested in thinking about how Rowling differentiates between these characters over all or in trying to find trends between characters in the fan fiction.

 

At this stage, you need to think about which corpus or corpora you're interested in studying and what kinds of comparisons you want to make. If you pull this site up on multiple tabs, you can even start making comparisons across all of these options. It's up to you! You'll also have the option to narrow down your focus even more when you get to the interactive visualization and have a better idea of what you're working with, so you can go both broader and more focused, depending on what you're interested in.

 

For now, go ahead and select "Between book and fan fiction" up above because this project was initially about that particular comparison, thinking about how the books and the fan fiction work differently.