Literal Encoding: Text is a first-class data encoding
This addresses a foundational gap in visualization paradigms for digital humanities researchers, proposing a new approach rather than incremental improvements.
The paper argues that literal text should be treated as a fundamental data type for visualizations in digital humanities, highlighting its functional, perceptual, cognitive, semantic, and operational advantages over traditional data encodings like graphs and charts.
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.