I found some beautiful posters that showed the punctation in different novels the other day. I was immediately curious if I could do something similar and wrote a little script (code here) to extract the punctation and print out a compressed representation of my favorite novels.
Then, like any proper scientist, I looked at the data and did some simple stats. Go see on Medium!
Here are a few of the (almost) full sets of punctuation from a couple of novels. For Pride And Prejudice, note the zoom-in versus the zoom-out:
Here are the files for Pride and Prejudice (alternate), A Doll’s House, and Romeo and Juliet.
Please let me know in the comments how totally I was wrong in my Medium analysis, and if there is anything you would like to see.
Update: Here a couple I thought were interesting. First, part of the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus:
And then Ulysses, the difference between the beginning of the book (first) and the end of the book (second):
Reblogged this on peakmemory and commented:
Great literature without all those bothersome words
..!
Wait… it’s more meaningful if I actually just say thank you for sharing this. I find the posters really beautiful.
It gives me a great decorating idea! I’m sure it’s been done before, but this punctuation pattern will be excellent as wallpaper, or painted directly on walls. I prefer wallpaper though, the thought of hand painting commas and colons and such is exhausting me already!
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So fascinating! Thanks a ton for sharing this work. It would so great to “see” any later novel by Virginia Woolf, queen of the semi-colon.
Reblogged this on Phillip M. Carter, II and commented:
I thought this idea was fantastic. The author also created heatmaps using the punctuation data and the resulting images are pretty awesome and I think would make great wall art if a hi-res image could be output.
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Great work! Is there any way to get a text version of the output and not an image? I’d like to do further analysis on it
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what about releasing also the heatmap version? That would be great!
Here is some more from january,
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3055691/wanted/8-classic-novels-reduced-to-their-punctuation
Never thought of looking at novels like that. Thanks for sharing this!
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