Visualizing Variation in Collections of Translations and Adaptations of Cultural Heritage Texts

We describe how we went about designing visualization tools for exploratory access to collections of multiple translations of a literary work. Collections of this kind are relatively small. But big collections are collections of small collections. Visualizations should help us to explore on multiple scales, shifting smoothly between (say) metadata on millions of items to (say) investigating how ten or a few hundred closely similar items differ in detail. For example: a small set of differing translations and adaptations of a work in one language, from different times and places; or a set of these sets in different languages. Collections of translations and adaptations have great potential value in education, research, and creative practices. We are creating ways to explore such collections, prompting various kinds of “noticing ” both in them, and in the translated work. Playful and exploratory approaches need to be combined with linguistics analyses and expert understandings of the texts and their contexts