This visualization shows Sylvia Plath's poem Mad Girl's Love Song. The visualization technique is a recurrence plot, which represents each word of the text as a square running diagonally down the page. When a word is repeated in the text, a square is drawn where lines from the pair of points would meet. You can see the word a square represents by keeping your mouse still above the square for 1 or 2 seconds. A diagonal row of points shows a repeated sequence of words. The closer to the diagonal points appear, the more recently they were repeated. A recurrence plot shows the overall frequency of repetition, but also shows where in the text repetition occurs.
Slight variation in the colour of the squares shows the length of each word (short words are darker blue). The squares overlap slightly to reduce the size of the visualization without losing information.
To see a recurrence plot of part of the Dr Seuss story Green Eggs and Ham, click here.
To see a recurrence plot (with annotations) of Dylan Thomas' poem Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, click here.