Here we can explore where the participants found beauty (answers are plotted in ‘beauty space’ like on the the Gunkel maps page ), but we can also see how they experienced that moment (using the themes in  the thematic coding coloured text page). 

The size of the circle shows you how much of the description of the beauty at that place in beauty space used that theme. It’s proportional, so if there was only one word but it had a theme that would be 100% of the answer, and the circle will be large.

You can see how different sources of beauty engage different (or the same) sorts of beauty experiences. We’ve compared ‘the event’ – a moment in science, or the experience of 12 Last Songs, with an experience reported from the participant’s daily life.

Look at ‘awe and wonder’ (in grey), or ‘connection with others’ (in yellow) to see how the performance and science events access different parts of the map, with different experiences, both to each other, and to daily life experience.

You can imagine the ways different emotions and feelings can be relevant in different kinds of moments.

There had been 13 respondents in the theatre group, and 28 in the science group at the time the plots were created. These were different groups of people, in different circumstances, being asked about different things. What’s more, all of these are subjectively analysed by us, so someone else analysing them may well have a different sense of what people said. We found the process of exploring these answers like this gave us a much deeper understanding of the kinds of things that people meant by ‘beauty’.