The Hotel New Hampshire - a dataart project

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The Hotel New Hampshire
a data-art project

Intro

Creating a visualization on the “data” of a book was always an idea I had in the back of my mind. And I always knew which writer I would choose because I am a big fan of his writing-style and his stories: John Irving. His books are full of colourful characters (often gays and/or trans are included) and the stories take you down a swirling path of events, which can feel as a rollercoaster of emotions. Disturbing, heart-breaking, unavoidably sad and luckily sometimes glorious moments. The book I chose, Hotel New Hampshire (from 1981) is the first one of John Irving I read, after that many followed. I remember the movie adaption vaguely but I do know it starred Rob Lowe, Jodie Foster and Nastassja Kinski.
So here you find my dataviz/dataart project on the Hotel New Hampshire. The characters from the book were the starting point for my visualizations: I counted the number of actions they carried out and the words they spoke.

Let me introduce you to them in this small summary of the book:

I haven’t revealed in this summary who dies (because some do) or who ends up with who and what events happen in-between. You should read it yourself is my advice. Or another book by John Irving, like The World According to Garp, which was a terrific movie with Robin Williams and John Lithgow.

The visualizations

The size of the figures

The visuals (chapters) show several figures which represent the different characters who play an important role within that chapter. The figures are proportionally scaled according to the number of actions they carry out within that chapter (the chapters are therefore not comparable to each other).

The dots and lines

Dots represent the amount of words spoken by a character within the chapter (black ones are animal sounds). The dots are attached to the concerned figure by straight and/or bended lines which are rotated 45 or 30 degrees either way.