Jeff:
why are the most frequently used words congregated at the top?
The text translates to a volume from top to bottom, thus the original instance of reused words will congregate towards the top of the volume.

is the visualization not in the text’s page order?
There is no delineation of the pages of text. My sources come from Project Gutenberg which does not cut the text up via pages. Also, this is supposed to visualize the structure of the text not the book.

is the length of the column proportional to the length of the work?
I would call it height, but yes.

have you visualized any plays?
No, but I have tried a poem and all I get is a really thin cylinder, which is less interesting to me. That’s a lie, the poem was a Shakespeare play. But the thin cylinder part is still true.

Brad: I have done a couple more books, but I no longer have a working 3d program that can deal with the file that the program outputs. I’d like to port this to processing at some point and open source it, but probably won’t have the time any time soon. Many other things on the plate at the moment.

Schoschie: I’m quite sure that someone could make it run real-time and display the textual information on mouseover. I imagine it would be somewhat processor intensive as we’re talking about tens of thousands of 3d cubes with associated meta content. While I probably won’t be attempting that anytime soon myself, as mentioned previously, I do hope to port this to processing at some point and let others input their own texts.

Jeff: Back when I first created this, I tried using the visualization system with the Bible, but it consistently crashed the application. As the project was done in a poor development environment, the Bible sort of over-extended the limits of the work. I hope to port this over to a more robust language some time in the future, and one of the first new works will definitely be the Bible.