People, Places and Emotions: Visually Representing Historical Context in Oral Testimonies

This paper presents visualizations to facilitate users’ ability to understand personal narratives in the historical and sociolinguistic context that they occurred. The visualizations focus on several elements of narrative – time, space, and emotion – to explore oral testimonies of Korean “comfort women,” women who were forced into sexual slavery by Japanese military during World War II. The visualizations were designed to enable viewers to easily spot similarities and differences in life paths among individuals and also form an integrated view of spatial, temporal and emotional aspects of narrative. By exploring the narratives through the interactive interfaces, these visualizations facilitate users’ understandings of the unique identities and experiences of the comfort women, in addition to their collective and shared story. Visualizations of this kind could be integrated into a toolkit for humanities scholars to facilitate exploration and analysis of other historical narratives, and thus serve as windows to intimate aspects of the past.