Screen shot of The Preservation of Favoured Traces. It illustrates the evolution of ideas across the six editions of On the Origin of Species.
This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen for a long time. Data visualization is one of the most interesting applications of computing that I know of today, using a variety of tools to take huge amounts of data to enable that data to communicate itself accurately, compellingly, and, often, with beauty.
This one was done by data-viz guru, Ben Fry. The story is about the evolution of scientific ideas, and our natural sense that they come in a flash, full blown, and find themselves written and published for posterity, before the flash fades. Yet, the book that we read today, Darwin’s “On the Origin of the Species,” is the sixth edition of the book.
The first English edition was approximately 150,000 words and the sixth is a much larger 190,000 words. In the changes are refinements and shifts in ideas — whether increasing the weight of a statement, adding details, or even a change in the idea itself. (( Fry, Ben. “On the Origin of the Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces.” Ben Fry. 8 Sep 2009 <http://benfry.com/traces/>. ))
The addition of “by the Creator” was added in second edition. The phrase “survival of the fittest” — actually attributed to British philosopher Herbert Spencer — didn’t appear until the fifth edition.
What Fry has done here, is to represent this evolution of ideas by graphically illustrating the changes that occurred in each chapter, with each new edition. It is a fascinating thing to watch. You can even lay your pointer on a specific tiny bar, and the text represented by that bar will pop out. Brilliant!
Have fun with On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces.
Powered by ScribeFire.