PlotVis is a 3D visualization system built using the Unity game engine that allows researchers to load an XML-encoded story, select elements of interest, then manipulate the resulting display by yawing, rotating, zooming, panning, and so on. Researchers may choose from one of five designs currently available. Figure 1, for example, shows a screenshot of the Fibonacci sequence design, where tagged segments of text are represented as coloured cylinders that together form a Fibonacci-based disk. The colours correspond to the taxonomy of tags, with different shades of green for action, thought, character, and narration, while blue is for objects, and yellow for dialogue.

Figure 1: This screenshot demonstrates the complexity of the semantic markup in a single story (Alice Munro’s “The Love of a Good Woman”, 1998), with each coloured cylinder representing one of roughly 7000 tagged segments of text. Clicking on individual cylinders reveals the text contained within the tag in question at the bottom left of the display.