Thursday, April 21, 2016

Visualizing Shakespeare's sonnets

Gramener, a data visualization firm (follow them on Twitter), has recently launched a very simple but quite effective tool to visualize Shakespeare's sonnets. I'm a fan of visualizations that are not overdone, the kind that makes you feel that designers were trying too hard to impress their readers with their technical acumen. This is not one of those. It's straightforward, readable, and works decently on mobile. Here's how many times “love” appears in the poems:

And this is what happens if you explore the graphic a little bit further, by clicking on any of the sonnets: