Visualization and Interpretation in Digital Text Analysis page 
We typically communicate through language, but often we also communicate with images. How we get information from pictures, however, is different from how we process texts in ways that become crucial when our communication partner is an algorithm. Visualization helps us make sense of the processes of computers and use them to get new information—even and especially when the materials they deal with are not images. This is shown by the field explicitly dedicated to the study of texts: literary analysis. The most recent and innovative research does not use “literary” tools. Instead of reading texts, literary scholars visualize them, utilizing images rather than language.
As Franco Moretti and Oleg Sobchuk put it: “If there is one feature that immediately distinguishes the digital humanities (DH) from the ‘other’ humanities, data visualization has to be it.” DH experts who apply computational techniques to expand the scope and the capabilities of textual analysis are obtaining information with innovative categories and tools—and raising unprecedented issues, such as in studies of the “loudness” of voices in literary texts or of the relationship between the lengths of titles of novels and the size of the market. But the results of this literary analysis are not gained by reading literary texts and are not expressed in literary form. They are not spoken or written—they are shown. page