The Origin of Species

Ben Fry, On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces, 2009

This post connects to a number of the recent ones and is characteristic of the the non-linear access we can have to knowledge. Thinks of it more as conceptual provocation in a series of projects that alter our traditional perception of very large pieces of information and the visualization of a pretty intense editing process that is usually hard to trace with traditional comparative studies. 

"Ben Fry, well-known for Processing and plenty of other data goodness, announced his most recent piece, On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces, made possible by The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online.
The visualization explores the evolution of Charles Darwin's theory of, uh, evolution. It began as a less-defined 150,000-word text in the first edition and grew and developed to a 190,000-word theory in the sixth edition.
Watch where the updates in the text occur over time. Chunks are removed, chunks are added, and words are changed. Blocks are color-coded by edition. Roll over blocks to see the text underneath."

(Via: flowingdata.com, September 7, 2009)

You can watch a the live, interactive demonstration of Ben Fry's "On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces" here. Make sure you use a browser with Java plug-in installed (FireFox works on Mac). You can even play with the slow and fast buttons that change the speed of the visualization. 

Ben Fry had been a guest in the lecture series BRAIN.STORMS at the Harvard GSD last spring and spoke about this project, among others which included a mobile application  for researchers that acts as a browser of the whole human genome. As Fry mentioned, “The idea that we can actually see change over time in a person’s thinking is fascinating. Darwin scholars are of course familiar with this story, but here we can view it directly, both on a macro-level as it animates, or word-by-word as we examine pieces of the text more closely.”