Visualizing Plot in 3D

We describe the design of several new forms of interactive 3D visualizations, to be used in teaching the concept of plot in fiction. Conventional approaches to teaching plot tend to rely on a Victorian visualization known as Freytag's Pyramid, which is well suited to a certain range of material but is not appropriate for all fiction currently being taught. Our new visualizations have the potential to allow teachers and students to explore different approaches to understanding plot. We focus in particular on three visual strategies, each of which describes significant features such as characters, objects, events, and transitions in space and time, while respectively emphasizing recurring elements in a primarily sequential structure, complexity of structure, and centrality of some designated feature or features. The technical aspects of the visualizations emerge from the availability of digital text that can be encoded for plot elements using XML.