Visualizing books
November 18th, 2009 by rbanks
One Book, Many Readings: Visualizing ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ Books
“Christian Swinehart subdivided these ‘narrative’ and ‘endings’ groups based on the number of choices offered (e.g. a ‘branching’ page or a ‘choiceless’ story page) or the goodness of the ending (e.g. from ‘great’ to ‘catastrophic’), and then color-coded the pages accordingly. The resulting frequency dot plots, spanning about 12 different CYOA books published between 1979 and 1986, show a gradual decline in the number of endings and a decline in the number of choices available in the books. Other visualizations include distribution graphs (all pages lined up in a single row by group), branching decision frequency graphs (pages close together in the story flow are close together in the map, more frequent paths are brighter), and animated story paths (growing arcs depicting the possible page jumps within a book).” 
information aesthetic
