This visualization shows Dylan Thomas' poem Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night. 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.
Each word of the poem has been annotated along the diagonal, down the left and along the bottom of the plot. Annotations make it easier to see which words or phrases are being repeated, and helps show how the visualization works. Slight variation in the colour of the squares shows the length of each word (short words are darker blue).
To see a recurrence plot of part of the Dr Seuss story Green Eggs and Ham, click here.
To see a recurrence plot of Sylvia Plath's poem Mad Girl's Love Song, click here.