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Tag clouds, frequency histograms, and web-like artistic genealogies have helped scholars explore literature on a visual level, teasing out themes and connections and revealing new tones in classic works. Stefanie Posavec’s Writing Without Words breaks Jack Kerouac’s On the Road into its core elements, presenting a series of visualizations in which the work devolves into ever smaller parts. As paragraphs, sentences, and words branch away from the main narrative, Posavec assigns colors to represent major themes in Kerouac’s autobiographical novel and explores the rhythm and cadence of his language, yielding images that range from a strangely floral analysis of the book’s first part to bar-like frequency diagrams of individual words. The visualizations–alternating between flowing, chaotic, and oddly choppy and structured–mirror the text itself, which Kerouac created during marathon writing sessions on a continuous telex paper scroll and which Truman Capote famously dismissed as “typing” rather than writing.
While Posavec has given extensive thought to On the Road–creating in some instances works more beautiful than their inspiration–she employs the same basic concept to examine differences in writing styles between individual authors. In lieu of the fluid, multilevel, visualization of Kerouac’s work, Posavec’s comparative exploration relies on the opening chapters to create an image based on the flow of language. Short, choppy language appears as a dense, tightly wound, ribbon of color while more flowing sentences breathe and sprawl across the screen (Posavec’s site includes a similar visualization of Kerouac’s sentence structure).
. Historian Shae Davidson's research interests include public policy and the relationship between culture and civil society. His publications range from articles on industrial history to absurdist poetry.
