Visualizing a network graph of senders and recipients of letters from Ras Shamra-Ugarit.

The chart above is derived from properties assigned to Texts in the RSTI project.

Each letter in the corpus is tagged with properties to define the Addressee(s) and Addressor(s), where observable. These metadata properties are relational variables that point to Persons from the Persons & Organizations category in the database. We link to the same database item that represents the King of Ugarit when he is attested in various texts.

We use a query to find all texts that attest these properties, save the results to a Set, then use the networking graphing features in OCHRE to define the desired aspects of the visualization.

In this case, the choices were simple. We only defined the source and targe nodes as addressees and addressors. We then chose a few colors and shapes for the nodes. The King of Ugarit appears in some texts as the addressee and in others as the addressor, so his node is displayed in a third color.

A click on any node in the graph displays the list of texts where this node is attested. See the Properties list on the left side of the screen above. These texts are clickable links to open and inspect the texts.

The same approach can display the network of data using any relational property in OCHRE.

This represents an integrated approach to data visualization. The underlying data is not exported and saved in a derived format. The graph simply gathers the core data for analysis. This lets the user interrogate this data for potential errors, correct the errors, and redraw the graph for instant results.

However, should the user wish to export the dataset for manipulation in another visualization tool, the Set is available for export as .csv, .xlsx, or .xml.