Visualizing text is neither easy, nor a straightforward task and often it is totally useless. Here, we try to give a visual summary of various texts and the question if any of the visualizations is useful left to the reader. Woody Allen’s bon mot, “I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.” serves as our disclaimer here.

One can learn a lot only from the punctuation marks of a novel. We can see patterns, e.g. the ratio of quotation marks and etc, but it is not too informative.

We used our favorite childhood hobby, Turtle graphics to visualize each and every sentence of War and Peace. First, we parsed the book into sentences, and we measured the length of each sentence in characters. Also, we clustered the sentences, and we build a semantic graph and assigned a PageRank score to them. For each sentence, first the turtle turns 90 degrees and draws a line with a length proportional to the length of the sentence. The color of the line is determined by the cluster of the sentence, and its width is determined by its PageRank value.

The rhyme of a text can be visualized as a kind of punch card or Morse coded text. E.g. the length or the weight of a syllable can be short (point) or long (dash) word boundaries can be represented as empty cells.

Can we learn anything from these visualizations? Or at least they can be seen as tools that reveal something about the texts that used to generate them so they are works of art?

 “Works of art put our making practices and our tendency to rely on what we make, and so also our practices of thinking and talking and making pictures, on display. Art puts us on display. Art unveils us to ourselves.”

Alva Noë: Strange Tools