Visualizing literary narratives with a graph-centered
approach
Meg Ermer
School of Computing
Southern Adventist University
Collegedale, Tennessee
mermer@southern.edu
Abstract—The art of storytelling is multifaceted and nonlinear,
involving multiple characters, themes, and symbols while often
jumping between the present and past. While media forms such
as novels can encapsulate these complexities, it is often difficult
to visualize a narrative in an easy-to-understand format. Our
contribution is a graph-based system to let users organize and
visualize those narratives. Events and characters are represented
as nodes and their relationships are represented as edges. Neo4J
is used as a database management system to store the graph
and to run queries on it, and Streamlit and Pyvis are used to
represent the database in the user interface.
Index Terms—data visualization, data science, graph, database,
node, edge, literature, narrative
I. I NTRODUCTION
Striking similarities exist between the fields of literature
and data science. Both require strong competencies in reading
comprehension and writing fluency, as well as the ability to
summarize and draw conclusions from an abundance of infor-
mation. Within data science, the data visualization discipline
enables data analysts to quickly see trends and summarize
findings through bar graphs, scatter plots, histograms, and
many other graphical representations. However, in literature,
there are no tools to visually represent the plot for readers,
leaving literary scholars with almost no way to draw their own
conclusions except with their own interpretation of information
directly from the text. While some tools exist to help visualize
certain aspects of narratives, they are either very advanced
tools that must be adapted to fit the narrative storyline [1],
or they rely almost exclusively on the timeline approach with
no way to represent relationships between different characters
and events [2].
Thus, our contribution is a web application that allows the
reader to add different characters, relationships, and events
from a narrative into a graph database. The reader can then
interact with the user-interface to run queries on this data,
returning the corresponding nodes and edges in an easy-to-
read manner. This enables the user to visualize the general
trajectory of a narrative as whole rather than having to draw
conclusions straight from the raw text.
This paper is organized as follows: Section II presents the
state of the art. Section III provides the theoretical framework
for this tool, and then Section IV describes methodology
used in its creation. Finally, Section V presents the resulting
Germán H. Alférez
School of Computing
Southern Adventist University
Collegedale, Tennessee
harveya@southern.edu
contribution, and Section VI discusses the implications of our
contribution and explores opportunities for further research.
II. S TATE OF THE A RT
VOSviewer [1] is a software tool for building and visualiz-
ing bibliometric networks with information about researchers,
journals, and individual publications. VOSviewer’s text mining
functionality also allows co-occurrent networks of key terms to
be extracted and visualized from different pieces of scientific
literature. While this software can be adapted to visualize
nearly any concept in terms of nodes and edges, it is not
designed with narrative summaries in mind. Thus, there is no
way to easily display different types of relationships and the
software is not oriented towards time-centered data.
Bandara et al. [2] designed a timeline-based approach to nar-
rative storylines with Yarn visualization. This proposal allows
multiple characters’ timelines to be visualized simultaneously
without coexisting in the same timeline. Yarn allows the user to
efficiently generate all possible timelines within a narrative and
to view storyline layouts that depict non-linear point-of-view
narratives. However, this visualization does not display non-
character-centered elements, such as relationships with places
or objects of importance. Moreover, each node on the timeline
is action-oriented, which results in the inability to fully see
relationships between different characters, only the resulting
actions of those relationships.
StoryPrint [3] is an interactive visualization for script-based
storylines. StoryPrint utilizes a radial-centered approach, with
rings representing characters, scene delineation, and setting.
This ring method allows the viewer to contextualize the
frequency of a character’s dialogue and the length of a scene
in proportion to the total length of the story. It also facili-
tates comparative analysis by allowing the viewer to easily
recognize patterns with characters’ emotions, interactions, and
frequency of dialogue. StoryPrint also displays character emo-
tion through color overlays that represent a scale of negative
experience to positive experience.
While each of these tools and proposals contributes valuable
features to narrative visualization, they all lack the ability to
types of relationships between data. In literature, the relation-
ships among people, places, and elements are as important as
the people, places, and elements themselves.
 III. T HEORETICAL F RAMEWORK
There are several preexisting concepts and technologies
that contributed to the creation of this web application, as Directed Graph Database
visualized in Fig. 1.
A. Directed Graph
A directed graph has a nonempty set of nodes and a set
of edges that is a subset of the square of the set of nodes
composes composes
[4]. Nodes can be thought of as circles that represent different
entities, and edges can be thought of as the lines that connect
those entities to other entities.
B. Database
Graph Database
A database management system is a collection of connected
data, usually called a database, and a set of programs to
access that data [5]. Databases are widely used by universities,
enterprises, banks, airlines, and many other corporations to
store information and records about finances, accounting,
students, and transactions. data represented in queried through
C. Graph Database
A graph database is a database that emphasizes the relations
between data as much as the data itself [6]. Storage can PyVis Streamlit
be visually represented like that of a directed graph, with
the data being the nodes and the relationships between the
data being edges. This allows the database to better describe
the complexity of connections within a dataset. Neo4j [11]
is the leading native graph database that utilizes Cypher as displayed in displayed in
its query language. Cypher is similar to SQL in relational
databases, but vastly more efficient with easier-to-understand
syntax [7]. Cypher eliminates the need for multiple joins and
view creations that many SQL queries require.
Web Application
D. Streamlit
Streamlit [8] is an open-source Python-based library de-
signed for building data science web apps. Its syntax and
structure allows users to create clean applications with minimal
lines of code. Streamlit is unique in that the front-end is taken Fig. 1. The concept map of technologies and theories that compose the
resulting web application.
care of within the backend, and its data caching speeds-up
computation pipelines.
E. Pyvis IV. M ETHODOLOGY
Pyvis [9] is a Python library project that allows users to To create a web application to visualize literary narrative
build and visualize network graphs. Graphs built with Pyvis data, a proper database management system (DBMS) must
are interactable, allowing hovering and dragging of the nodes be chosen, and then the proper libraries must be selected to
and edges. Pyvis is built around the JavaScript library VisJS. represent the data in the front end. This section outlines the
components of creating this application.
F. Web Application
A web application, otherwise known as a web app, is an A. Choosing a Database Management System
application hosted on a web server and delivered over through A DBMS was needed to store the data that the reader inputs.
the internet through a browser [10]. Unlike other applications, Because the data was to be represented in a graph form, a
web applications do not need to be downloaded because they graph database was chosen. This prevented long and needless
are accessible through a network. There are three parts to SQL queries to be created in order to string together rela-
a web application: a web server, an application server, and tionships between data stored in a relational database. Neo4J
a database. The web servers are responsible for managing [11] the most popular DBMS today, was selected because it
client requests. The application servers complete the task. provided Cypher, a reliable and easy-to-use querying language.
The database stores necessary information needed for the Neo4J’s desktop application also supplied a convenient way to
transaction. check and see that the queries were being properly fulfilled.
B. Choosing Front-end Libraries
The web application utilizes two Python libraries to display
the user interface. Initially, a React frontend with MaterialUI
components was considered, but time and convenience ended
up being the key factor in settling on Python-based libraries
instead of incorporating JavaScript. Because Streamlit [8] is
designed specifically for data science, it is used to allow the
reader to input the data from the narrative and submit it to
the DBMS utilizing the various input methods built in to the
library. Representing the graph database was another aspect
of the frontend. At first, the NetworkX library was considered
for the task, but ultimately Pyvis [9] was chosen due to its
cleaner and more interactive visualizations.
V. R ESULTS
The resulting tool is a web application that allows readers
to enter characters, places, and things from a narrative into a
database that is then visualized as an interactive graph. The
primary actions that the user can make on the database are
creating an entity and describing the relationships it has with
other preexisting entities.
The data used to demonstrate the functionality of the tool
is taken from C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia series,
with all nodes being derived from different people, places, and
objects throughout the seven books.
A. User Interface
Fig. 2. The input types for the storing of data.
Upon opening the application, the user is presented with
several input types in which to enter data about the node
being created, as shown in Fig. 3. The user selects the type
of element it is, with the choices being ”Character,” ”Place,”
and ”Thing,” and then names the element. The user can also
add an optional description with more information. Next, the
user selects any existing nodes that the element is related to
from a drop-down menu, and then is prompted to specify the
type of relationship. Upon submitting the data, the graph is
updated with the new node and edges. As seen in Fig. 6,
Fig. 3. The resulting graph displays a network of people, places, and things
from the story.
orange nodes indicate places, blue nodes indicate people, and
green nodes indicate things. The edges between the nodes
relate the elements to each other, and the type of relationship
is displayed when the user hovers the cursor over the edge.
The physics of the Pyvis library also allow the user to drag
and move the nodes around.
B. Creating a node
One of the most important features of this web application
is to create a node, as they represent the people, places, and
things throughout the story.
In order to create a node, a general, callable create node
method is used whose parameters include the type of node
being created, the name of the node, and a dictionary of
relationships that the node has, as seen in line 184 of Fig.
4. In line 184, a Neo4j session is then started with proper
authentications. Then, a series of conditionals checks to see
what type of node is being created, calling the appropriate
helper methods as needed.
Fig. 4. The callable create node method
After the type-specific helper method is called with the
name of the node as a parameter, such as shown in
create character in Fig. 5, a Cypher query is run to submit
the data into the database. The command MERGE creates a
new character with a specific name if it does not already exist,
as seen in line 69. Once the node is created in the respective
helper method, the create node method is returned to and the
length of the relationships dictionary is checked. If the length
is 0, indicating that the node is unrelated to any other existing

Fig. 5. The helper method create character that creates a node of type
”Character.”
nodes, lines 195 and 196 are skipped, and the session is closed.
If the relationship dictionary contains something, the general
create relationship method is called for each relationship in
the dictionary.
C. Creating a relationship
To create a relationship between two nodes, a general
create relationship method with parameters specifying the two
nodes and the relationship type is utilized, as seen in Fig. 6.
After starting a new session with proper authentication, the
helper method create and return relationship is called with
the aforementioned parameters. In this helper method, pictured
in Fig. 7, the two nodes are created, if they do not already exist,
with the MERGE keyword. Then, a unidirectional relationship
with the specified relation type is created between the two
nodes. The query is attempted, and if it fails, the error is
excepted and raised.
Fig. 6. The callable create relationship method
Fig. 7. The helper method create and return relationship method queries
into the database to create a connection between the two nodes.
The resulting web application is useful to members of
the linguistics discipline because it allows them to track
and visualize relationships between different entities within a
piece of literature through graph theory. The resulting network
highlights the most pivotal and interconnected pieces of data
and the ways in which they connect to other elements within
the story.
VI. C ONCLUSIONS AND F UTURE W ORK
This paper describes a web application that allows the
a reader to input various characters, places, and elements
from literary narratives. The current prototype has no way
to track the changes in relationships over time. A feature
that allows the user to see how relationships between entities
evolve throughout a literary narrative would be useful in
demonstrating plot and character development.
Additionally, it is expected to implement a natural language
processor such as the Bidirectional Encoder Representations
from Transformers (BERT) model would allow the application
to ”read” the narrative and then graph the elements rather
than have the reader input the information. This could prove
useful to students and members of the literary field who
want to quickly generate a graph representing the relationships
between entities in a piece of literature.
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