Michal Luria – Final Project Proposal

For my final project I would like to create a data visualization project of plays. My idea is to look at famous plays in new ways, by presenting various aspects of their structure. I will use the actual text of the play to generate data, and then present it in ways that only consider the structure, not the content. I hope this will present the characteristics of an era or genre, regardless of the play content.

Since all plays are based on character dialog, I would like to show who is on “stage” at every given movement. To represent the dialog itself, each character would have a “circle generator” on the canvas (image below). Each time a character would say a sentence, a circle will be generated, and will expand slowly until faded.

Since the project requires analyzing real texts, a large portion of the challenge would be to convert the text into data that can be used for a visualization project.

This visualization would allow overviewing a play in fast forward mode, and to show the dialog dynamics between characters, their relationship and dominance, and what character is on stage the most or least.

According to complexity and time limitations, a few more ideas on how the project can evolve are:

1. Compare two plays from different eras and allow viewing how their structure varies in parallel.
2. Have the character that speaks the most centered – the least a character talks, the further they are to the edge.
3. Adapt the circle generator to create circles that stay on screen according to their length.

Attached is a sketch of how the screen might look like, while “playing” the play in fast forward: