the shape of text

by angela ambroz

cs171 (harvard extension school)
spring 2016

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?


The average vocab per story hasn't changed much

vocab 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 .