Visualizing Voldemort, Books Characters:

Bar Chart

Information for reading this visualization:

• The graph above is a bar chart that shows the percentage of the top 100 most similar words that fall under each of seven different parts of speech in the seven novels versus the 450 pieces of fan fiction. This chart is obviously looking at something a little more particular than some of the other charts we offer on here. We wanted to give an example of what it would look like to look at something specific with the patterns of speech in a chart, and this will show you how each character relates to other parts of speech.

• While bar charts are pretty typical, this is a combined stacked and side-by-side bar chart. Basically, each character gets two bars: one for the books and one for fan fiction (plus an extra pair of bars that show the averages of the books and fan fiction). Each bar is actually seven bars stacked on top of one another, one for each of the parts of speech that appears in that character's top 100 most similar words.

• If you hover over any mini-bar, it will tell you the character, source, part of speech, and percentage that bar represents. If you click on one of the mini-bars, it will highlight that mini-bar. If you click on a character name at the top, it will highlight the two bars for that character. If you click on the "book" or "fan fiction" titles at the bottom, it will highlight that one bar. If you click on a part of speech in the legend, it will highlight that part of speech in the entire table.

Questions to prompt analysis:

• If you had guessed, before seeing this chart, which part of speech would be most commonly similar to our character names, what would you have guessed? Were you right or not?

• What trends can you find between books and fan fiction? Do books or fan fiction tend towards one part of speech? Why would that part of speech appear so often?

• How does Voldemort compare to the other characters? Is there one part of speech that appears more or less than with the other characters?

So, what did you find? Leave a comment to tell us what you thought and check out what others have been seeing!