While browsing through Lee Byron's website, another interesting visualization project caught my eye. I've linked to his website before, on a
post about visualizing personal audio histories. This one instead is about visualizing poetry in terms of repetition patters.
It always helps that Byron's visuals are so aesthetically appealing -- it makes them even more captivating. Check this one out...
It uses visuals to highlight different levels of patterns in a limerick: large yellow arcs capture the higher-level structure of the poem; narrower purple arcs capture patterns among words, like rhymes and alliteration; the bars along the bottom denote the number of syllables in each line.
If you look closely you notice even more patterns that add complexity to the visual.
I would have loved to see something like this when learning the structure of poems in grade school. Lessons on meter and "perfect" vs. "feminine" rhymes always seems so dreary and hard to remember, especially in contrast to the musical nature of poetry.
Speaking of music... I could see really interesting applications of this sort of visual to music, particularly from the Baroque period -- pieces like Bach's fugues that rely so much on patterns and repetition.
Check out more of Byron's poetry visualizations
here.
