The Reply

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about an email that I sent to Stephan Thiel about visualizing Shakespeare and the arts. I recently received his reply. Here are his answers to my questions.


Question: What do you see as the specific benefits of such visualization? In what ways does this sort of thing provide a new understanding of the music or literature being visualized?

Answer: I kind of like how the two terms 'distant' and 'close' reading might point to the actual difference of any kind of abstraction introduced when working with the texts. With distant reading you introduce a new form of abstraction between the source text and the reader, which always introduces a layer of interpretation between the two. Whether this interpretation is done by a human (manually) or a software program (algorithmically) doesn’t really matter. in the end, the algorithm has also been designed by a human being.

So whats the benefit of another layer of abstraction (and its representation/communication through visualization)? I think its a huge experiment as of yet, but fun and fascinating with lots of potential. The challenge/chance is: we have access to art pieces on a broad scale never before seen. Which layers of comparison/analysis and which form of visualization can we find, that would make visible broader connections among a body of work. i.e. the 'common' structure of Shakespeare comedies (which you’re are somewhat interested in), similarities of melodic structures from Baroque componists, etc. Finding such things directly benefits humanists and researchers dealing with the material, evaluating a thesis or finding patterns through experimentation. But also it could serve as a great tool for education – imagine students learning about the big picture of Romanticism in visual explanations before diving into example texts/works. It would also help professionals currently working in related fields, ie. theatre/film professionals dealing with narrative structures all day, or professional translators which need visualization to better support their worksflow when translation huge texts (choices of words, continuity of grammatical style, etc.)

So, bottom line: the benefit is a better overview over these complex works – and hopefully with better overview comes better understanding. But its a long and complex process...

The algorithmic approach I often choose is then another kind of thing. I am simply fascinated by the possibility of looking at/distantly reading multiple texts through code and see what happens. I am aware that this approach has its weakness but also its strength.

Q: Do you think that visualization can influence one's subjective interpretation of the piece, or do you think that it is more of an analysis of the objective patterns and structure measured in the piece (such as notes and rhythms in MIDI files, or frequency of terms and phrases in Shakespeare)? What are the benefits of analyzing the objective data versus subjective interpretation of a piece of art?

A: as mentioned above, visualization and analysis is never completely objective. the programmer of an algorithm always chooses things of interest and can exclude or manipulate the outcome of an algorithm. the only difference is the determinability of an algorithm. if it is defined it will act and produce output accordingly. humans don’t behave like this. we change perspective and our measurements on-the-fly (often subconsciously). so, I see both as in 'interpretation' and find algorithms interesting for their deterministic nature (i.e. I seek for 'formulas' to apply to data, which is incredibly fun)

Q: Also, in what way do you picture this sort of visualization as engaging the public mind? Do you think of it more as a way to experience the works that are being visualized or more as a way for interested individuals to analyze and better understand the work?

A: both actually. the liszt piece was designed for a full dome theater. for people to sit together watch the thing and talk about what they’ve seen afterwards. this is an ideal learning environment I think.
the Shakespeare stuff (and other things related to visualising Shakespeare translation, which I currently work on with researchers from Swansea University in Wales) is also targeted at such contexts, possibly an exhibition showing the visualizations and people talk about them, etc. Also parts of this could also work as tools for professionals (interactively).

I really enjoyed his insights. Later this week, I plan to write more about what I think about these ideas.