How Information Grows

Author: Ignacio Baltazar Pérez-Messina

Text is a human product, intellectual but also physical. A book cannot be made in one blow, but through small increments and iterations.
Fifteen consecutive drafts of a 250-page book are visualized here in one image. We concatenated the drafts, then reduced the words to stems. From left to right, sentences are displayed as columns where the stems appear as white dots. From bottom to top, each row is a unique stem, stacked in order of appearance. This order is maintained throughout the drafts.
The visualization shows a new way of visualizing writing processes, that leads to some features of the whole process (like writing strategies) that have been identified in previous literature to show themselves in a somewhat uncanny way. The QR code on the poster leads to an animated visualization where the order of drafts is changed, allowing a view to the whole of the process from different points in evolution.
Data comes from an anonymous source.