Charts

Each motif page includes a Charts subpage that shows the same motif from multiple angles: spatial orientation, occurrence strength, cumulative development, cadence, novelty, chapter concentration, teaching style, companion motifs, and corpus role context.

The page is intentionally ordered. Read top-to-bottom: each chart answers a different question and prepares the next.

This page documents what each chart answers, how to read it, and how it is built from the underlying data.

The shared foundation

All motif charts are generated from the same motif-level payload, centered on motif occurrences joined to ordered Text units.

Input data

Most charts use occurrence-level records with a global order index, salience score, seed/milestone/zenith flags, novelty score, and the controlled code values. Additional charts use chapter-level trail aggregates, co-occurrence summary rows, and the corpus-wide frequency and intensity metrics.

Horizontal positioning

Section-level timeline charts map the occurrence’s position in the Text into a normalized horizontal position, so that proportional spacing is preserved across the full Text. Chapter Density is chapter-bucketed (one point per chapter), so its x-spacing is chapter-step based rather than section-proportional.

Color system

Key-moment colors are consistent across charts:

When presence is toggled to salience tiers, tier colors use the same tier palette used across the site.

Chart 1: The Spiral Staircase

What it answers: What does this motif’s full journey look like as one coherent shape?

An outward spiral from Chapter 1 (center) to Chapter 31 (outer edge). Each dot is an occurrence. Key moments are drawn as distinct symbols. This is the most metaphorical visualization, directly evoking Wapnick’s description of the reader’s experience. Clusters show concentration zones; empty stretches show where the motif is quiet.

The spiral is rendered on an HTML canvas along an Archimedean-style path with fixed revolutions, with each occurrence projected onto the spiral by its normalized position in the Text.

Chart 2: Motif Presence and Intensity

What it answers: Where does the motif appear, and how strongly at each stop?

A horizontal track with vertical bars. Each bar is one occurrence. The x-position is the section’s position in the Text, and the bar height reflects salience strength. A color mode toggle switches between key-moment colors and salience-tier colors.

Tall bars indicate stronger salience. Clusters indicate sustained local attention. Gaps indicate motif absence.

Chart 3: The Motif Ascent

What it answers: How does motif accumulation evolve across the trail?

A cumulative staircase or area profile over the same timeline axis. Upward movement represents cumulative build. Local dips are possible and meaningful: they indicate a lower local contribution than immediately adjacent points in the selected model.

A toggle lets users compare two ascent models:

• Weighted salience—later stops carry more leverage
• Equal salience—each stop contributes the same amount

Chart 4: The Motif Thread

What it answers: Where does this motif appear, stripped to pure location?

A minimal line with occurrence markers across the Text. Dense dots indicate repeated local recurrence. Long gaps indicate motif silence. Key moment colors and symbols preserve structural anchors.

The thread deliberately removes height and intensity encoding to maximize distribution readability. A compact version of this chart also appears inline on section page motif cards with a “you are here” marker and prev/next navigation.

Chart 5: Key-Moment Cadence

What it answers: How far apart are major motif anchors?

A timeline of key moments only (seed, milestones, zenith), connected in sequence. Each segment represents the gap between consecutive key moments. Longer links imply larger section-distance between anchors. The chart reveals whether the motif’s turning points are tightly clustered or spread far apart.

Chart 6: Novelty vs Salience Timeline

What it answers: Which appearances are reinforcing vs introducing new movement?

A scatter timeline where the x-axis is location in the Text, the y-axis is novelty score, and dot size encodes salience strength. A midline guide separates higher-novelty regions from lower-novelty ones.

Higher dots are more novel. Larger dots are more salient. Large, high-position dots often indicate significant developmental shifts in the motif’s arc.

Chart 7: Chapter Density (Lollipop)

What it answers: At chapter granularity, where is the motif concentrated?

A lollipop chart across the chapter sequence with a metric selector:

• Stops per chapter
• Max salience per chapter
• Weighted chapter density (combines stop count with additional key-moment weighting)

Peaks mark chapters with stronger motif concentration by the selected metric. A “stop” is one motif occurrence in one section; chapters can contain multiple stops.

Chart 8: Controlled Code Mix (Ranked Rails)

What it answers: How is this motif being taught, not just where it appears?

Ranked rails for controlled-code values, with scope and sort controls. Longer rails mean a higher share of occurrences with that code value. Scope lets the reader isolate one code dimension or inspect all of them together.

This chart reveals how the motif is being used across the Text, not just where. For what the code dimensions mean, see Controlled Codes.

Chart 9: Top Companions

What it answers: Which motifs most reliably travel with this motif?

A ranked bar list of the motif’s highest co-occurrence companions. Higher ratio bars indicate stronger pairing frequency; shared-section counts in the tooltip help distinguish broad from narrow pairings. The data comes from Pass 5.

Chart 10: Corpus Role Matrix

What it answers: How does this motif sit in the full corpus role landscape?

A 3×3 matrix over frequency (x) and intensity (y), with every motif plotted and the current motif highlighted. The matrix uses tercile-aware normalization so each Low/Mid/High band uses space effectively for inspection. Colors and highlight indicate role category and current motif focus.

For role definitions, see Role Categories and Frequency and Intensity.

Why this sequence exists

The page order is intentional:

1. Orient the reader (Spiral)
2. Show direct occurrence shape and force (Presence, Ascent, Thread)
3. Add temporal diagnostics (Cadence, Novelty, Chapter Density)
4. Add interpretive and relational context (Code Mix, Companions, Role Matrix)

The charts are not separate stories. They are coordinated views over the same motif behavior at different granularities, and each one adds a layer the previous ones did not cover.