You’re looking at Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species – every word of the 1869 edition, in fact, turned into an intricate visualisation. Information artist Stefanie Posavec tracked the evolution of Origin’s six editions from 1859 to 1872 and charted its changes.
Posavec is renowned for her intricate “literary organisms” – dense, foliage-like visualisations of the sentence structures in books such as Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. Those took weeks of hand-tooling in Illustrator. Here, she’s teamed up with ecologist-turned-Microsoft-researcher GregMcInerny,who crunched Darwin’s opus through Processing, the infovisualiser’s favourite app.
Posavec drew inspiration from museum displays and botanical illustrations to give the data a Victorian vibe. The outer ring represents the length of the edition. It’s divided into four, from outer to inner: sentences; paragraphs; sub-chapters; chapters on the inner ring. Green segments survive to the next edition, orange ones change or die. The darker the colour, the longer it has survived.
The inner flowers echo the data in the outer ring – trunks are chapters, sub-chapters stems, sentences leaves etc. Fuzzy placings and structure give the work an organic feel, like specimens pressed under glass.
itsbeenreal.co.uk<img src="http://cdni.wired.co.uk/674x952/d_f/darwin_intro.jpg" alt="Darwin"/>
<img src="http://cdni.wired.co.uk/659x425/d_f/diagram_ed_1.jpg" alt="Darwin"/>
<img src="http://cdni.wired.co.uk/659x425/d_f/diagram_ed_2.jpg" alt="Darwin"/>
<img src="http://cdni.wired.co.uk/659x425/d_f/diagram_ed_3.jpg" alt="Darwin"/>
<img src="http://cdni.wired.co.uk/659x425/d_f/diagram_ed_4.jpg" alt="Darwin"/>
<img src="http://cdni.wired.co.uk/659x425/d_f/diagram_ed_5.jpg" alt="Darwin"/>
<img src="http://cdni.wired.co.uk/659x425/d_f/diagram_ed_6.jpg" alt="Darwin"/>
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
