the shape of text
Hello, world!
Welcome to the shape of text
, a text visualization of all stories available on Strange Horizons (including mine!), an online speculative fiction magazine.
Strange Horizons launched in September 2000, and has been going strong ever since - approximately 15.5 years. They publish a story a week, and their word limit is 10,000. That's over 8 million words! What can these 8 million words tell us about how speculative fiction has evolved in recent years?
vocab
per story hasn't changed muchvocab
is calculated as a story's total vocab divided by a story's total word count. While there are certainly outliers, Strange Horizons stories have had the same (standardized) vocab for the past 16 years.
This project was built using:
Full code is available here on GitHub.
For a narrative about the project, including decisions, dead-ends, and pictures, see the process book .