Visualizing a Thinker's Life

This paper presents a visualization framework that aids readers in understanding and analyzing the contents of medium-sized text collections that are typical for the opus of a single or few authors. We contribute several document-based visualization techniques to facilitate the exploration of the work of the German author Bazon Brock by depicting various aspects of its texts, such as the TextGenetics that shows the structure of the collection along with its chronology. The ConceptCircuit augments the TextGenetics with entities - persons and locations that were crucial to his work. All visualizations are sensitive to a wildcard-based phrase search that allows complex requests towards the author's work. Further development, as well as expert reviews and discussions with the author Bazon Brock, focused on the assessment and comparison of visualizations based on automatic topic extraction against ones that are based on expert knowledge.