Wow! Just stumbled upon the work of Stefanie Posavec. She has made literature into beautiful art by counting words, sentences, paragraphs and categorizing the content in different classic novels. She represents her findings visually in a a project called Writing Without Words, and has explored On the Road by Jack Kerouac in great detail. Below you see a portion of the novel visualized by the length of each sentence, and the color based on what the sentence is about.
Sentence drawing for On the Road by Kerouac.
The “doodle” above explained.
Various authors’ writing styles emerge from these weird abstract doodles when she visualize the first chapters of their books.
Another kind of visualization of On the Road using a tree structure. The tree divides Part One into chapters, then into paragraphs, then into sentences, and finally sentences are divided into words.
Some of the hard work Posavec did in On the Road by Kerouac to structure the content.
By Posavecs’ systematic approach, she has made a lot of different visualizations, and I admire both the idea and the excellent design work. Luckily, I can put a poster on my wall to remind me of what great ideas and hard work can lead to. Check out Stefanie Posavec’s Writing Without Words project:
Wow indeed! This made me really want to read On the Road. Despite the long sentences. The main character even shares my birthday. Must be awesome!