Beyond One-Dimensional Portraits: A Synoptic Approach to the Visual Analysis of Biography Data

The study of biography data – and the reasoning with it – can be supported by multiple visualization techniques. Biographical databases contain massive amounts of temporally structured biographical entries, connecting events, places, institutions and actors with a variety of relations between them. We present a synoptic visualization concept for multi-dimensional biographical analyses, to go beyond well-established techniques to portray one-dimensional data aspects. We discuss synergies arising from the combination of multiple synchronic and diachronic views into a more coherent visual analytics environment. Possible synchronic views include geographic, relational and categorial perspectives on biography data (e.g., maps, network and treemap diagrams), while multiple diachronic perspectives are provided by coordinated multiple views, animation, layer superimposition, layer juxtaposition, and space-time cube representations. By closely intertwining these visualization methods we aim to support the creation of more integrated and connected mental models of biographical data. This visual framework is open for other fields of application like prosopographical research, digital history, or many other time-oriented arts and humanities data domains.

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