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The relationships between historical figures in historical documents
help us to understand or imagine changes in the structure of a past society.
Such relationships look similar to relationships on social networking sites,
such as Twitter or Facebook. Of course, historical figures in historical
documents did not have mechanisms to follow each other in the same way
as we do in social media. However, we can infer that they had relations
among each other through our reading of historical documents. Our
interpretation is based on the fact that they shared the same, or similar, sets
of events, such as battles or social upheavals. It is possible to identify
changes in key historical figures and groups of people, and their rise and
fall. These relationships have characteristics such as friendliness and
hostility, and such characteristics also change over time. For instance,
Pompey and Caesar, military and political leaders in ancient Rome, were
very good collaborators at the beginning of Caesar's career. However, they
had battles after Caesar gained power. We can read the story and structure
of past society from these changes in networks of historical figures to
understand the underlying reasons for such changes.
A visualization of human relations from various viewpoints allows us
to explore interactively and gain insight into past societies. This affords us
inspiration from historical documents and allows us to derive unexpected
aspects of relations or, indeed, new knowledge.
Our visualization framework first provides a mechanism for extracting
networks of historical figures from historical data and then for visualizing
time-varying changes in the structure of networks along with a timeline in
a 3D space. It allows users to extract networks of people with multiple
aspects such as “battle” or “gift”. Users can compare the differences and
similarities of their evolution and can visualize the formation of groups of
people, the figures with most influence in such groups, and changes in the
structure of the groups.
It is desirable to grasp not only structural changes but also characteristics
of relationships between historical figures. We therefore provide
mechanisms for extracting characteristics of relationships and visualizing
them with different colours. This enables users to observe what kind of
characteristics a group of people had. It also enables users to observe
temporal changes in characteristics of relationships between two people.
The key contributions of the proposed system are that it enables users
to explore temporal changes in networks of historical figures interactively
and in the details of relationships between figures in the networks. It
allows us to check whether visualization accurately represents existing
knowledge and to explore novel phenomena or patterns that are not
already well-known.
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