I received an email from Neema Tasbihgoua, a Simple Complexity reader, informing me of some visualization projects he had completed. Below is a series of images from a visualizattion of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl”. The project is a visualization of the use of letters and words in the poem.

This poster compares the use of each letter of the alphabet in the poem. Starting at the bottom right corner, the radius of each circle indicates the number of times a letter is used, E is the most often used (as it is in the English language) with 1722 instances, and Q is the least with just four. The poster follows the established colour code present throughout the posters.

The second poster illustrates a few things. The top left stepped pie chart demonstrates how many words start with each letter. The middle and bottom left parts analyse the mood of the poem: words are colour coded positive (cyan), negative (magenta) and obscene (yellow: yellow on white is hard to read, therefore a form of censorship of the less child-friendly words). Every unique instance of each word in the poem is listed and coded. The cyan, magenta and yellow words are then counted up, then converted into a percentage of the total of the three categories, and these percentages are then mixed as actual CMY pigments to give a colour that expresses the mood of the poem. Finally, on the right, there is an alphabetised list of every instance of every letter, including capitalised instances in the order of their placement in the poem.

The final poster reconstructs the poem in a colour-coded typeface of squares. This poster aims to demonstrate how Ginsberg often repeats words (for example, the first line of ‘Footnote to Howl’ is the word ‘Holy’ repeated fifteen times) thoughout the poem. Each Tetris-like shape is an individual line from the poem, and the poster is split into four, one for each part of the poem.

Neema is a recent graduate from a Graphic Communication degree, and he would love feedback on his body of work. Check out some of his other projects on Flickr: 24fps and 2001 Space Odyssey

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