Uncharted Research
Literal Encoding: Text Is a First-Class Data Encoding

Digital humanities are rooted in text analysis. However, most visualization paradigms use only categoric, ordered or quantitative data. Literal text must be considered a base data type to encode into visualizations. Literal text offers functional, perceptual, cognitive, semantic and operational benefits. These are briefly illustrated with a subset of sample visualizations focused on semantic word sequences, indicating benefits over standard graphs, maps, treemaps, bar charts and narrative layouts.