Literary Fractals

This is just a quick something. I am between classes and sitting in the adjunct lounge goofing off online, where I ran into the following:

You can see fuller descriptions of this whole project here at Gawker and at NotCot. The basic explanation is that the artist, Stefanie Pasavec, is creating a literary map of Kerouac’s On the Road, a book I could not care less about, but that’s not what’s interesting about the project. I’m actually surprised no one brought this up yet, and a google search of the artist’s name and “fractal” nets nothing, but that very obviously has fractal properties, and as NotCot says, “The maps visually represent the rhythm and structure of Kerouac’s literary space, creating works that are not only gorgeous from the point of view of graphic design, but also exhibit scientific rigor and precision in their formulation: meticulous scouring the surface of the text, highlighting and noting sentence length, prosody and themes, Posavec’s approach to the text is not unlike that of a surveyor.”

This is interesting in terms of the manipulation of a certain state space, and that when manipulated in a certain way, the regularities and patterns become apparent. In other words, certain ways of analyzing books will not evince the literary patterns in the book, but if one stretches the space in a certain way, those patterns emerge.

This site, Flowing Data, might hold some interest as well.

Filed by andyb at April 7th, 2008 under Complexity