Day 10: Visualizing Poetry & Reflecting
Today’s Visualization
Title: Words and Syllables in Walt Whitman’s When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
Notes: This visualization represents Walt Whitman’s poem, When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer, which is considered free verse poetry. I was interested in dissecting the structure of the poem, so I plotted the number of words and syllables per line. The full poem text is below.
Tools: Google Sheets, Adobe Illustrator
Reflection
Today is Day 10, which means I’m 10% finished with my 100 Day Project! Before going through my progress for the day, I want to briefly reflect on three lessons I’ve learned so far.
- Having no plan is both a blessing and a curse. I’m a planner at heart, so starting this project with little idea where to begin or how to structure my time was really uncharacteristic of me, and not a strategy I would recommend to everyone. It resulted in me sampling many different facets of data viz/science instead of choosing one topic to focus on first. However, as a recovering perfectionist, jumping in head first was a great way for me to gain momentum without being overwhelmed by needing to do just one thing perfectly.
- There’s always going to be more to learn; view it as exciting, not overwhelming. I touched on this a bit on Day 5, but I want to note again that no matter what field you’re in, there’s always going to be things you don’t know. This is a good thing, because it means that there’s constant opportunity for growth! Every time I Google a topic, I find at least 10 more rabbit holes to explore. Over the past 10 days, I’ve become much more comfortable bookmarking those interesting articles or videos for later and refocusing on the task at hand. It’ll all still be there if you want to investigate it later! (But I’ll be honest–sometimes I just watch the cool video :) )
- Comparison is the thief of joy. This is more general life advice that you probably hear all the time, but I’ve needed to remind myself of it frequently. The internet is a great place to find inspiration and resources, and I’ve loved looking at work from incredible data artists, scientists, and storytellers around the world. With that, however, comes the worry that I’ll never be “good enough” to be part of this community. Chances are, I’ll never be the best at this–whatever “this” is. But that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t be proud of my work, my progress, or the joy and satisfaction I’m gaining through the process. I’m happy I took the leap to try something new, and I’m looking forward to continuing to learn and improve every day!
Aside from this reflection, I had a lot of fun visualizing a poem today, which was inspired by this article discussing what characterizes free verse poetry. I was originally only going to look at only the number of words, but thought that number of syllables would be interesting as well. It turned out that plotting them together yielded an interesting pattern that wouldn’t be revealed from glancing at the text–that’s the beauty of data viz! Here’s the poem I used, Walt Whitman’s When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
As a rough rule of thumb, word count in a poem corresponds to what it looks like on the page, while syllable count corresponds to what it sounds like when spoken. Put another way, the number of words determines how long the line is on the page, while the number of syllables determines how long it takes to speak the line. Therefore, it was interesting to see where the word and syllable counts had the biggest differences and how the general shapes of the word and syllable plots were the same.
This is the closest I’ve come to what I would consider “data art” versus “data visualization,” and I really enjoyed playing with the colors, graphics, and layout to create a more symbolic representation. There are so many potential ways to encode different elements of poetry, so I hope to make more poetry visualizations in the future! If you have any ideas for poems to look at or ways to represent them, please don’t hesitate to let me know :)
Today’s Recommendation
Where the Wild Things Glow by Jonni Walker
This breathtaking visualization depicts the presence of bioluminescent creatures along the coast of Australia. The full viz is beautiful to look at as well as filled with information, so I hope you check it out.
Until tomorrow,
Paige
