FocalLens: Visualizing Narratives through Focalization

I am grateful and very thankful to Prof. Naimul Hoque for his guidance and support on this project. FocalLens introduces a narrative visualization approach centered on focalization: who sees, perceives, narrates, participates in, or observes events in a story. The work provides a theoretical grounding for focalization, translates those concepts into an interactive visualization, and evaluates the tool with writers and literary scholars analyzing draft and well-known stories. The findings show how focalization can add an analytical layer for identifying narrative patterns, biases, inconsistencies, and literary style.

arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.14456