Literal Encoding: Text is a first-class data encoding

Richard Brath

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arXiv · 2009.02374

Literal Encoding: Text is a first-class data encoding

Richard Brath

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Abstract

Digital humanities are rooted in text analysis. However, most visualization paradigms use only categoric, ordered or quantitative data. Literal text must be considered a base data type to encode into visualizations. Literal text offers functional, perceptual, cognitive, semantic and operational benefits. These are briefly illustrated with a subset of sample visualizations focused on semantic word sequences, indicating benefits over standard graphs, maps, treemaps, bar charts and narrative layouts.

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Richard Brath. 2020-09-04. Literal Encoding: Text is a first-class data encoding. https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.02374

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