Visualizing Varieties of Association in Orlando

This paper explores ways of visually presenting large, complex sets of interlinkages discerned through the textbase markup of Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present. Visual means enable detailed connections to bring out broader, general patterning, explored here through two prototype web interfaces along with our dilemmas, strategies, and reflections. One prototype traces links between people on the model of the six-degrees-of-separation concept. Since the shortest path between two linked people is usually not single but hugely multiple, the conceptualizing and representing of these paths is highly complex. The Mandala XML browser offers a different approach to drawing out meaning from these connections too complex for prose to explain. Each of these prototypes offers a new approach to probing humanistic data through non-verbal tools.