Visualizing The Iliad

Among the many blogs I read, there are some which never almost never cross paths with my interests in mythology and literature. One of these is FlowingData, a blog that “explores how designers, statisticians, and computer scientists are using data to understand ourselves better — mainly through data visualization”. Catching up on recent posts this morning, I learned of a new data visualization project by Santiago Ortiz, in which he maps out the relationships between characters in The Iliad.

There are two distinct visualizations — actually three, since one of the visualizations is really a two-for-one. That’s the “network” view. It gives a grid on the left, mapping out the intersections between characters, and a sort of three-dimensional node map on the right. Move your mouse over either and observe the results!

This view, for my money, is the more difficult to use and understand, but take a look at the “stream” view (part of which is pictured above). In this two-dimensional view, the books of The Iliad are laid out horizontally (scroll with the mouse), with parallel streams representing the major characters. As in a word-cloud, the larger a character’s name, the more prominent his role at each point in the poem. It’s a little bit like the classic xkcd representation of The Lord of the Rings (if you haven’t seen it, follow this link; and note: it’s the film version).

Fascinating, eh? I think these sorts of creative visualizations can really help students grasp the complexity of expansive literary works like those of Homer, Virgil, and Tolkien.

Note: The visualizations use the HTML5 <canvas> element, so you’ll need a browser capable of rendering it. That’s most of them, but with the conspicuous exception of any version of Internet Explorer except the latest (version 9).