Wordless Tales: Visualizing Literature Through Data
A Showcase of Visualized Literary Masterpieces
Do you remember the scene from the film “Dead Poets Society” when Professor Keating has the boys tear out the introduction to the poetry book? I hate it.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the film. Who among us hasn’t felt trapped by an oppressive school system, yearning for a mentor, a “Captain, My Captain!” who truly sees us? I certainly have. However, the scene where the boys tear apart J. E. Pritchard’s introduction with the graph about poetry has never quite sat well with me.
Back then, I couldn’t tell why; maybe I do now. In the introduction, the graph’s x-axis represents the degree of “perfection” of the poem and the y-axis indicates its “importance:” A sonnet by Byron might score high on importance but low on perfection, while one by Shakespeare could excel on both axes. “Excrement,” comments Professor Keating, and he’s right. In hindsight, though, I think that the issue doesn’t lie with the graph itself, but rather with its attempt to assign scores to poetry. What if, instead of ranking Shakespeare against Byron, we examine the distinct use of punctuation in their works? The distribution of verses across different themes? Their unique styles? What if we aimed to quantify the unquantifiable?
For some time now, I’ve been captivated by the potential of visualization applied to literature. It serves not only to cast new light on classics, offering fresh approaches to works we thought we knew inside and out, but also to potentially revolutionize how we engage with them. What I find even more fascinating is its ability to provide a holistic view of a medium (the written words) that we can only experience linearly (through reading). It’s a linguistic shift that fundamentally alters how we interact with a piece of literature. What follows is a curated (and not exhaustive!) collection of examples illustrating how data visualization has attempted to explore literature.
Let’s begin with a conventional approach: examining literature from an external standpoint. This involves analyzing an author’s body of work (years of publication, numbers of novels, short stories, etc.), without delving into the content of the text. Let me highlight an example that particularly intrigues me: “From First Published to Masterpieces,” by Accurat Studio. This visualization maps the output of notable 20th-century authors from their debut works to their masterpieces. Each novel is a triangle arranged on a circular timeline that represents the author’s lifespan; each triangle is color-coded to denote the author’s debut (gray), the first masterpiece (yellow), the second masterpiece (orange), and so on.
We learn that Jack London debuted at 24, Virginia Woolf published “Mrs. Dalloway” at 43, and Jean Rhys published her masterpiece “Wide Sargasso Sea” at 76 (for all you authors out there, there’s still time!). Using the age instead of the year of publication, this visualization humanizes authors and transforms them from mere black-and-white figures in textbooks into individuals.
Now, let’s delve into the content of a text. When we think about a novel we love, we probably remember its characters. Visualizing literary characters is a thriving field, and I have worked on it; if you’re interested in Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, where I designed a triptych of visualizations about the characters encountered by the poet. I wrote about it here: The Poet’s Journey.
Martin Grandjean mapped the characters of Shakespeare’s tragedies: each character is represented by a node connected to the ones who appear in the same scenes. The size and color intensity of each node correspond to its weighted degree, offering insights into character hierarchy. Some plays clearly reveal the groups that shape the drama: Montague and Capulets in “Romeo and Juliet”, or the conspirators in “Julius Caesar”. This is a great example of how visualizations can condense sequential plot moments into single snapshots, offering an instant overview of narrative dynamics.
What if we want to visualize places? Federica Fragapane’s “Map of Fictional Places” shows the geographical coordinates of fictional locations across various mediums, including books, comics, video games, movies, and television shows. The visualization categorizes places based on whether they served as inspiration, filming locations, or are referenced in the work. From Hogwarts to Dawson’s Creek, from Twin Peaks to Arendelle, if you have a “touristic” curiosity, this is the visualization for you.
And since we’ve explored space, let’s travel time. My visualization “Imagine the Time” analyzes the timelines of 50 famous science fiction books (no more talking about myself after this, I promise). Spanning from 3 million years in the past to 30 million years in the future, this visualization depicts the temporal settings of sci-fi novels, including temporal arcs, alternative timelines, time travel, and uchronies (yes, I’ve read all of them and compiled the dataset manually). It’s essentially a timeline of imaginary timelines, a glimpse into alternative realities.
Let’s move on to a more ambiguous area than characters and settings: themes. “In Her Own Words” by William Careri is an immersive exhibition designed for the Allentown Art Museum and it focuses on Virginia Woolf’s diaries. As the author writes: “Virginia Woolf kept personal journals throughout her entire life […] where she discussed literary work, feminism, mental health, familial relationships, society, and other authors and artists. The journals themselves amounted to 1,616 total entries written within 30 journals spanning 26 years”. In the image above, the diaries are divided by year and by theme.
Now, I’d like to delve deeper into a project that holds a special place in my heart because it was the first of its kind I encountered when I was a student, and it left me spellbound: Stefanie Posavec’s “Writing Without Words.” This series of visualizations is an exploration of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road:” Posavec meticulously constructed the dataset from the text, coloring and categorizing the words by themes entirely by hand. The visualization itself was crafted in Illustrator without the use of any code. Posavec says, “It’s important to spend a certain amount of time gathering information by hand […] it creates a bond between you and what you’re working on: I had to read and reread ‘On the Road’, so the result is more of a representation of the text as it appears in my mind, of my experience exploring the novel.”
The visualization “Literary Organism” features a tree structure: the novel’s Part One is divided into chapters, chapters into paragraphs, paragraphs into sentences, and sentences into words, with colors encoding the themes of the book. This perspective, akin to viewing the text from a bird’s-eye view, was revolutionary for me as a student.
Exploring further this project, “Sentence Drawings” offers a fascinating exploration of the actual writing. This visualization presents “On the Road” in its entirety: every line is a sentence, at the end of each sentence the line curves 90 degrees to the right, and its length corresponds to the length of the sentence. Similar to the previous visualization, colors indicate themes.
Through this method, Posavec visualized the first chapters of other famous novels, revealing clear differences in style among various authors. Reading Aldous Huxley and William Faulkner are very different experiences, we realize this by immersing ourselves in their texts, but in the image below we can see the difference in the writing. Imagine extending this analysis to entire novels, or comparing an author’s early works with their later ones, or exploring texts from different centuries and countries. It’s a compelling attempt to quantify the intangible: an author’s literary style.
Nicholas Rougeux’s “Literary Constellations” presents another intriguing point of view. Each constellation represents the beginning of a novel, with the trajectory of the lines indicating the type of word (adjective, adverb, conjunction, etc.), the size of the dots, and the length of the line representing the length of the word. While more artistic than analytical, this project offers a beautiful visualization of language.
A novel isn’t made up of words alone. Adam J. Calhoun takes an interesting approach by removing everything from the text except the punctuation (inspired by a series of posters by Nicholas Rougeux). Despite losing the words themselves, we can still see the construction of the sentence and the differences between “Blood Meridian” by Cormac McCarthy, and “Absalom, Absalom!” by William Faulkner. Whether they contain laconic periods or are full of subordinates, whether there are few or many dialogues, whether there are questions, and whether the author loves or hates exclamation points. Punctuation, which we usually don’t notice, here becomes the protagonist.
Lastly, here is one of the most ambitious projects about literature I’ve ever seen: “Atlas Calvino” by the Density Design Lab of Politecnico di Milano. This set of interactive visualizations analyzes Italo Calvino’s works from an external point of view (years of publications, collections etc.) and an internal one (contents and writing).
“Atlas Calvino” follows three distinct paths: Doubt Itinerary, Space Itinerary, and Form Itinerary. The first one analyzes a theme dear to Calvino, doubt, through physical elements that manifest it, like fog. The second one analyzes locations, both terrestrial and cosmic. The third one analyzes the writing: lists, plot, metaliterary texts, and much more. It’s truly a labyrinthine project in which I loved getting lost.
Let me be clear: a visualization will never replace the immersive experience of reading a text, caring for characters who never existed, boarding the whaling ship with Herman Melville, or fleeing from Gilead with Margaret Atwood. However, it represents an intriguing experiment. Sometimes it’s an atlas of places, times, or characters. Sometimes it focuses on one detail at a time, like themes, words, and punctuation. Above all, it offers a new perspective. It’s a partial, imprecise, sometimes chaotic, and extremely creative way of seeing what’s beyond the written words, shedding new light on this captivating and beautiful matter that is literature.
And on this point, I believe Professor Keating would agree.
PS: This is just a short selection of projects. If you’ve encountered similar visualization focused on writing or other types of textual content, I’d love to hear about them! Feel free to contact me :)
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