How to Use This Website
Step 3: Choose a Visualization
This is the last step before you actually get to see your visualization. Before you can see something, you have to choose which kind of visualization you want to see:
Different kinds of data can produce different kinds of visualizations, and different visualizations will reveal different patterns. For each focus, we've already selected two key visualizations which you can further interact with to hopefully find some interesting patters. Here are the two kinds of visualizations you can find for each comparison:
For book versus fan fiction:
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Bubble chart: Bubble charts allow you to visualize patterns by size and color. In these bubble charts, you will see the top five most similar words to your chosen character in both books and fan fiction. Each distinct word has its own color, and the bigger the bubble is, the more similar it is to the character name. Using this, you can see which words are most similar to your chosen character and if there is any overlap between the words.
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Pie Charts: This option will show you two pie charts, one for the books and one for the fan fiction. Traditionally, pie charts show you percentages of a whole, but we decided to use them slightly differently. Effectively, these pie charts show which words are the most similar word to your chosen character name through the use of size: the larger the slice of pie, the more similar that word is to your chosen name. We've included the top ten most similar words, and this is just another way you can see how similar the words are in comparison to each other.
For across the books and across fan fiction:
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Line charts: Line charts are particularly good for showing change across several sets of data. They show measurements for different data points and how these measurements change over a series. In this instance, the line charts will show how similar words are to Harry as you move through each book or through the different years of fan fiction.
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Box plots: Box plots are used to show how spread out a data set is by showing the minimum, quartile 1, median, quartile 3, and maximum numbers of a data set. Effectively, for this data, box plots can demonstrate how similar and dissimilar the top 100 words are to your chosen character over a given time period, so you can see if the character starts to become more diluted over time.
For comparing characters in books/fan fiction:
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Bar charts: Bar charts show how many of something you have. In this case, we made a combined stacked and side-by-side bar chart that allows you to see how many of each part of speech falls in each character's top 100 most similar word lists, comparing books and fan fiction. This graph probably includes the most data of any that we offer.
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Treemap: Treemaps show two different sets of data in relation to each other through both color and size. In this case, the size of the boxes determines how similar a word is to a chosen character while the color determines which character. This allows you to look at the top five most similar words across characters, all in one place.
This choice will obviously determine which kind of graph/chart you see. The nice thing is that it doesn't really matter which you choose: you can always go back and try a different one later. So, pick one that tickles your fancy. There are obviously many more types of graphs, charts, and tables than what we show here, but this will give a general idea of some of the many types you can use and how to read them.
Right now, we just want to focus on figuring out which words are the most similar to Harry in books versus fan fiction. We think the bubble charts will be the easiest way to look at this, so go ahead and select bubble charts above.