  The circulation of historical books has always been an area of interest for
historians. However, the data used to represent the journey of a book across
different places and times can be difficult for domain experts to digest due to
buried geographical and chronological features within text-based presentations.
This situation provides an opportunity for collaboration between visualization
researchers and historians. This paper describes a design study where a variant
of the Nine-Stage Framework was employed to develop a Visual Analytics (VA)
tool called DanteExploreVis. This tool was designed to aid domain experts in
exploring, explaining, and presenting book trade data from multiple
perspectives. We discuss the design choices made and how each panel in the
interface meets the domain requirements. We also present the results of a
qualitative evaluation conducted with domain experts. The main contributions of
this paper include: 1) the development of a VA tool to support domain experts
in exploring, explaining, and presenting book trade data; 2) a comprehensive
documentation of the iterative design, development, and evaluation process
following the variant Nine-Stage Framework; 3) a summary of the insights gained
and lessons learned from this design study in the context of the humanities
field; and 4) reflections on how our approach could be applied in a more
generalizable way.
