Gabriel García Márquez's most famous work chronicles the history of the fictional town of Macondo through several generations of the Buendía family. When reading it for the first time, I found myself having some trouble keeping up with the characters; many of the characters share similar names, and with that comes similar traits (a prominent theme of the novel), so it was hard to tell who was doing what in the story.

While conflating these characters is not the worst crime in reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, keeping track of everyone can be distracting. My idea was to create a visualization that gave an overview of when characters appeared in the novel. As you can see in the picture, the characters are listed on the vertical axis, and the progression of the book lies on the horizontal axis, and is broken up into chapters. Each time a character is mentioned, it is indicated by putting a mark in the row of that character and the column of when it appears in the book.

I would expect this to show patterns of character activity, like when that person lived, or when they were remembered after their death, and how characters were related to one another. For example, Ursula, the matriarch of the family, is alive throughout most of the novel, and the visualization would express this as she would have marks all along the horizontal dimension. Furthermore, each character would have their own unique color, and if one scrolled over an event that related to multiple characters, those instances would be highlighted.