Writing Without Words: Visualizing a Book
Literature as a canvas, a book as a living organism, and rhythm as a texture.
London-based artist Stefanie Posavec has a gift for words. Or for the lack thereof, to be exact. Her latest project, Writing Without Words, explores the literary world when its most important building blocks are removed by visually representing text.
The project uses Jack Kerouac’s iconic On The Road and takes a number of different approaches in dissecting its content visually. One examines “literary organism patterns” through simple tree structures that divide each of the book’s three parts into chapters, which divide into paragraphs, paragraphs into sentences, and sentences into words. All these elements are color-coded based on key themes in the book.
Another visualization technique looks at sentences, representing them by lines organized according to the number of words per sentence and color-coded to the theme.
Finally, there’s an exploration of rhythm textures — visualizing sentences by using their punctuation to create circular diagrams. Each line represents a word, with the thickness of the lines and the space between them representing the cadence, pauses and emphasis created by the punctuation.
So if you fancy yourself a fan of the written word and an advocate of visual literacy, now’s your chance to nail both — to your wall, that is: The work is available as on-demand posters here.
More about Stefanie and her work from NOTCOT.
- Poetry On The Road’s VisualPoetry Goethe in code, the texture of text, and what Flickr has to do with rhyme and rhythm....
- The Ancient Book of Sex and Science Four Pixar animators release a racy side project....
- Nonsequential Narratives: Hypertextual Books Ambitious atomic-level structural analysis of Choose Your Own Adventure books, visualizing all the possible reader paths within the narrative....
- Subway Personality: The MBTI Map Visualization showing the relationships between human personality descriptors from the MBTI test, using subway lines as a metaphor for the connections between the different representative words and personality types....
- Fun For Good: The Indie Rock Coloring Book Staying outside the lines, or what Rilo Kiley's latest haircuts have to do with charity....
Something in me viscerally hates this – reducing the complexity of a book to a representational image. Intellectually I think it’s interesting, but emotionally, I actually find it pretty upsetting, for some reason.
Amanda: Very interesting. I’m a big believer in gut reactions, so there must be something deeply valid about your response.
But what I’m most fascinated by in this project – and what I feel gives it the rich emotional dimension that saves it from simplifying the book – is the color-coding she uses to match the visual to the theme. I wish there were more information about her methodology on the site, but there’s something about the color-based representation of semantic context that gives it precisely the emotional quality that’s missing for you.
But, of course, that’s just my own subjective gut-driven interpretation.
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Wow this is really interesting! Thanks. Is this data visualization?
Also did I miss it or what are the key themes identified? I really liked the photo of her highlighted book. I thought she would have searched the text with computers.