Unseen Narratives: Data Visualisation through the Looking-Glass

De Nobriga, Amy ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0198-0218 (2024) Unseen Narratives: Data Visualisation through the Looking-Glass. In: Alice Through the Looking-Glass: A Companion. Genre Fiction and Film Companions, 13 . Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, Oxford, 233 -245. ISBN 9781800799844

Abstract

This practical investigation considers how data-visualisation can map Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, the theme of ‘choice’ and how the characters traverse throughout Carroll’s text. Data collection and visualisation are illustrative methods used to analyse the language in the text through Distant Reading, a method that seeks to map the text as data as opposed to a complete piece of prose. I am interested in this chapter in data as a means to illuminate the unseen or to quote computational media artist George Legrady “make visible the invisible” (Gil, I. 2010). Utilising simple geometry as part of a “data-drawing vocabulary” (Lupi G. 2017) to visualise the possibilities embedded in the narrative and subsequently the alternative hidden narratives. As such, this investigation proffers the following question: can geometry be used to visualise data from the text in unforeseen ways to explore the infinite probabilities and possibilities? The mirror, as both a material object and a conduit for reflection and multiplicities, can be understood as a portal to parallel happenings between Dodgson’s life and the narrative within the text. If we are to believe that an atom can exist in an infinite number of places at any one time, up until the point that it is seen, then potentially all possibilities exist until a choice is made. Can Dodgson’s mirror allow us to view the infinite? Are the choices made by Alice, a manifestation of the unseen choices that could, should, were and are made by Dodgson in a different moral universe? Utilising mathematical and systematic methods, via data-visualisation, allows for illuminating the text and its themes in unforeseen ways. Therefore, through studying the looking-glass as a manifestation of ‘choice’, this paper seeks to examine Dodgson’s multiverse, where familiarity becomes uncanny, possibilities infinite and ‘a world in which things go every way except the way they are supposed to’ (Gardener, M. 1965).

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