We are happy to announce our new Text Atlas project. It is now available as a blog on Tumblr on textatlas.tumblr.com and will later be published as a book and presented in exhibition format.

Text Atlas is a project dedicated to text network visualization. Our interest is in representing a text as a gestalt, allowing one to shift from a linear to a more holistic perception of writing and reading. This allows to better understand structural properties of a text, as well as uncover communication strategies employed by particular texts.

For example, The Bible and Quran are quite similar in the way that the discourse they generate is supporting several central concepts. While texts like “I Have a Dream” or “Alice in Wonderland” are less homogeneous and present several densely connected multiplicities that align together to generate a meaning.

Italo Calvino once said that writing is essentially a combinatorial exercise and reading is “a way of exercising the potentialities contained in the system of signs”. Representing text as a network does exactly this: offers new possibilities for interpretation and reading, which would normally be suppressed by the dominant narrative.

Check out textatlas.tumblr.com for the first images.