Visual Literature

The following work is experimental in nature and is in preliminary stages. The idea is to visually represent literary works of famous authors. The current page shows different visualizations of (mostly) works of William Shakespeare, an exception is Charles Dickens 'Oliver Twist'. The text of the literary works were taken from Project Gutenberg.

Color-Frequency Maps

The size of each representation is determined by the squareroot of the number of unique words in the work minus the 'stop words.' Color coding is determined by the absolute value of the difference of of frequency of the words for the two particular works. The words are arranged in the alphabetical order. The length of each row is equal to the squareroot of the number of unique words. Instead of layout the words in a single row, the words are laid out in a grid, thus if 'k' is the aforementioned squareroot then the 'k'th is directly above the '2k'th words in the alphabetic ordering.


Alls Well that Ends Well vs. Hamlet	Hamlet vs. The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopetra	Hamlet vs. Othello


Hamlet vs. As you like it	Alls Well that Ends Well vs. The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopetra	Othello vs. The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopetra


Hamlet vs. Oliver Twist	Oliver Twist vs. The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopetra


Othello vs. Alls Well that Ends Well	The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopetra vs. As you like it

Frequency Graphs

The following is an example of comparative frequency graph where the frequency of words in two works of literature are plotted against one another. One of the works is plotted on the x-axis while the other on the inverted axis. The fequency graphs can also be thought of as 'visual' signatures' for a literary work. Click on the graphs below to view the complete graphs.

Frequency Graph: Othello vs. As you like it (Click on the image for the complete graph)

Frequency Graph: Hamlet vs. Oliver Twist (Click on the image for the complete graph)

The following are essentially the same types of frequency graphs as the ones above but with the difference that the 'pixel explode' effect is delibrately added for facilitate discerning the difference between two works.

Exploded Frequency Graph: Othello vs. As you like it (Click on the image for the complete graph)

Exploded Frequency Graph: Hamlet vs. Oliver Twist (Click on the image for the complete graph)

Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad Data Mining Research Group. (2006)