Social network visualization from TEI data

Abstract

The focus of this article is a system for visualizing social network data derived from a TEI-encoded corpus of texts. It describes the collection of biographies of historical Chinese Buddhist monks, which constitutes this corpus and the TEI markup, in particular the innovative concept of a ‘nexus-point’ that was originally applied to them with the goal of producing GIS-like visualizations [see Bingenheimer, M., Hung, J.-J., and Wiles, S. (2009). Markup meets GIS - Visualizing the ‘Biographies of Eminent Buddhist Monks’. In Banissi, E. et al. (eds), Proceedings of Information Visualization IV 2009. IEEE Computer Society: 550–4.]. Over the course of this work, it became clear that a data set of nexus-points could be derived from this markup which would support a representation of the social network which can be inferred from the corpus. The nature of this social network is explored and some interesting preliminary applications are suggested. The software architecture which supports the visualization, based on the Prefuse toolkit, is introduced. Finally, the scope for the future development of the corpus and the system are discussed, and some avenues for potentially fruitful analysis are suggested. Throughout the article, it is argued that the methods and techniques employed here are applicable well beyond the present context. In describing this project of social network visualization, it is demonstrated that a well-marked-up TEI corpus can, with very little additional technical overhead and using the same markup, serve as the basis for multiple representations of the same data.

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