A New Perspective on the Study of Literature(Songci): Text Correlation and Spatio-Temporal Visual Analytics

The work of traditional historical and literary studies analyzes the specific literary works and background of writers in a case-by-case way. The content, emotion, and meaning of a literary work is closely related to its author’s life experience and the background. However, it is difficult to understand the above-mentioned connections by traditional methods, which may not address on the overall pictures. In this work, we propose a tailored text correlation and spatio-temporal visual analytics methods for classical literature, and we take Songci(a representative literature style in Song Dynasty in China) as an example. Those methods allow literary researchers analyze the trajectories of poets and the relevance and uniqueness of topic of literatures in different time period and their living background. Furthermore, through visual analysis of the rhythm, intentions, and expressions of emotions in the text, literary researchers can form multi-dimensional understanding. We cooperated with literary experts of Song Dynasty and conducted user study with them, which proves that the method we proposed can effectively help experts make an in-depth analysis of the literary career and work of the poets. Moreover, our method can provide them a new insight in a comparative way.