TEXT EDITORS and the files they work reveal little about the history of editing. Some tools provide revisions to browse, while others are limited to undo/redo. By adding temporal metadata to files, editors can display process in addition to product. This post introduces the writing graph, a timeline for viewing editing activity.
THE HISTORY OF MANIPULATING TEXT is rich with innovation from clay tablets to copy & paste. The predominant narrative converges on a digital standard adding and removing glyphs via a caret in a sequence of lines typically called a document.
Vi, Word & Notes.
A growing community of new media artists and creative coders would love tools that felt less utilitarian (e.g., Word) and more exploratory (e.g., Max); as a generative writer once told me, “[electronic] musicians are spoiled.”
Max enables interactive sounds via a sort of patch bay interface. Imagine a visual programming language designed for textual synthesis.
Introducing the Writing Graph
This visualization arose after talking with talented poets at Brown. As a psychologist I was intrigued to learn more about the creative process, to look inside their work. Visualizing typing over time gives readers a kind of x-ray vision into the ebbs and flows of a piece, something otherwise only conveyable in performance. More practically speaking, experts like computer programmers might use the temporal metadata to track when a particular line of code was not only committed, but authored.
THE APPROACH is to simply draw a rectangle under each glyph, the height of which represents time elapsed since the last activity. Activity can be defined in a number of ways (e.g., last click, last edit, etc.). Proof of concept:
You can only type in a single-line—which goes off-screen—or backspace. Press enter to reset. View the source (click this if your browser plugins block this embedding).
You can imagine complicating this ad infinitum: coloring the bars by other variables’ state at the time & location of each keystroke; normalizing the bars by difficulty of reaching for different keys on desktop/mobile; showing total time per document/paragraph/line/word/character; etc.
You can also imagine looking beyond typing, like showing how a paragraph and its alternatives were copyedited, or how the complex web of undo/redo was collapsed.