Language Dna: Visualizing A Language Decomposition

In the Digital Humanities, there is a fast-growing body of research that uses data visualization to explore the structures of language. While new techniques are proliferating they still fall short of offering whole language experimentation. We provide a mathematical technique that maps words and symbols to ordered unique numerical values, showing that this mapping is one-to-one and onto. We demonstrate this technique through linear, planar, and volumetric visualizations of data sets as large as the Oxford English Dictionary and as small as a single poem. The visualizations of this space have been designed to engage the viewer in the analogic practice of comparison already in use by literary critics but on a scale inaccessible by other means. We studied our visualization with expert participants from many fields including English studies, Information Visualization, Human-Computer Interaction, and Computer Graphics. We present our findings from this study and discuss both the criticisms and validations of our approach.