Print Visualizations at Data Stories 2024
Author: Ignacio Baltazar Pérez-Messina
Text, when written digitally, is but a series of insertions and deletions at different points in document and time. These operations can be structured and visualized in the form of a tree, which grows organically as the writer types in characters and makes editions in the text processor.For this experiment, we asked several professional writers to translate poems of Emily Dickinson, the founder of poetic modernism in English literature, and Victoria Ramírez, a promising novel Chilean poet, into each other’s language. The visualization picks up the arboreal metaphors with which the poems are concerned in its own way while allowing, for the first time in such detail level, to look behind the written page and see the trace of the writer’s process.
Data of the documents changelogs was extracted from Google Docs, platform where the translators worked separately on each poem.
This works expands on a previous publication of the author (a short paper at IUI 2018) which details the data transformation, visualization and findings; referenced on the poster.