Narrative Networks: Visualising TTT Research

Let's use Ouida and the subject of women's health as an example!

For one thing: Fran isn't an expert, and only feels as if she is accessing a small amount of what Prezi can do, but had fun putting hidden quotes in earrings and pendants...

Even so, it's clear that Prezi cannot really demonstrate the complexity of our networks, but might at least offer a snapshot of one or two case studies (or elements of a network), which might be useful in a particular context. It is also very easy to use and quite fun.

Use it with other programmes

(and the VRE)

You can embed all manner of features

Depth and Breadth

The spacious area provides the possibility for adding more dimensions to visual components, thereby increasing the amount and complexity of the information (data density). Authors can therefore include depth, without losing sight of the overall context.

Ouida, Infant Mortality and Maternity

Princess Napraxine

So how might it work?

"Late Autumn Came, and her child was born as the first red leaves were blown upon the wind. But, enfeebled by the distress of her mind during so many months before its birth, it breathed a little while the air or the earth, then sank into death as a snowdrop sinks faded in the snow".

British Reception

"Ouida does not aim at truth, to human nature, but rather at a blind monstrosity [...] when Ouida writes of the society and the world she is harmful" (Daily News, 1882).

Dutch Reception of Princess Napraxine

"When reading about what happens to the unfortunate woman, one feels like [one is] assisting [in] a vivisection scene ... Painters and sculptors need to know about the human body, but their vocation as artists does not lead them to provide illustrations for manuals in medical sciences. The same for the novelist: there must be beauty".

In Maremma

Purpose of Prezi for TTT

According to our database, Ouida was read by a number of other women writers...

It seems that Oliphant also read and was critical of other women writers of sensation fiction....

Of Rhoda Broughton's Cometh Up, she said "It is a shame to women so to write; it is a shame to the women who read and accept as a true representation of themselves and their ways the equivocal talk and fleshy inclinations herein attributed to them".

Margaret Oliphant writing on Ouida's novels: "very fine and very nasty books [...] They are so fine as to be unreadable, and consequently we should hope could do little harm, the diction being too gorgeous for merely human faculties."

Despite such critical reviews...

Broughton's Cometh Up was translated into French in the nineteenth century, while other texts were translated into Dutch.

All three of Ouida's novels (aforementioned) were read widely and translated into Dutch, and Moths was also translated into Swedish and Danish, while In Maremma made it into Russian. They were, however, frequently abridged, being considered too long and wordy...

Moths

"The child of Este was born with the daffodils; but he breathed a few short days after his birth, and died, softly and painlessly, as the daffodils did when they had bloomed their little hour... when at last his mother could be made to understand that dead indeed he was, despair seized on her, long convulsions succeeded to her passionate weeping".

"She had felt a strange emotion as she looked on its little body, lying lifeless; but it was neither maternal love nor maternal regret; it was rather remorse [...] "I am glad my children died".

Prezi provides a visual map or large canvas, which can include text, video, hyperlink and PDF docs.

Ideas flow freely, stories are created, and context and detail can be maintained through the concept of "micro-macro" reading/visualisation.

Put simply, Prezi allows for complexity, and multidimensionality, which is useful for the type of visuals we might want to create.

So what can we conclude?

Complex, Narrative Networks:

Visualising TTT Research