Philip Gates – Looking Outwards 07

Santiago Ortiz – History Words Flow (2014)
http://moebio.com/research/historywordsflow/

I am interested not only in history, but in how we choose to engage with our history: what sticks out as important after many years? What gets emphasized? What gets forgotten?

Ortiz’s information visualization is exciting to me because it depicts exactly this: not an objective history, but an extremely subjective one, using the frequency of words in Wikipedia entries about a specific period of time as a measure. Since Wikipedia is constantly updated, this graphic is a means of representing what, at this moment, the English-speaking internet community views as the most salient details of history stretching back for millennia, and what we imagine our future to be as well.

Though no information is provided on the computational techniques Ortiz used, I imagine he has written an algorithm that scrapes Wikipedia pages and finds the words that occur with the greatest frequency. These then get a colored band proportional to their frequency. The colors Ortiz has chosen presumably speak to his own artistic sensibility, and his own subjectivity is evident in the periods of time he’s chosen to depict (when he switches from centuries to decades to years, etc).