Exploring dynamic multilayer graphs for digital humanities

The paper presents Intergraph, a graph-based visual analytics technical demonstrator for the exploration and study of content in historical document collections. The designed prototype is motivated by a practical use case on a corpus of circa 15.000 digitized resources about European integration since 1945. The corpus allowed generating a dynamic multilayer network which represents different kinds of named entities appearing and co-appearing in the collections. To our knowledge, Intergraph is one of the first interactive tools to visualize dynamic multilayer graphs for collections of digitized historical sources. Graph visualization and interaction methods have been designed based on user requirements for content exploration by non-technical users without a strong background in network science, and to compensate for common flaws with the annotation of named entities. Users work with self-selected subsets of the overall data by interacting with a scene of small graphs which can be added, altered and compared. This allows an interest-driven navigation in the corpus and the discovery of the interconnections of its entities across time.