Colorpress

Colorpress was an online tool and printed collection of grammatical portraits of various books, short stories, poems and other textual works.

These generative data portraits can be described as a pixelated representation of all the words in a book, color coded by various grammar rules. We also code occurrences of various characters and special phrases in each book.

We started out with the aim of creating a portraiture of an entire book to see what would it look like if each word was replaced by a pixel. The kinds of images that resulted looked like fingerprints of the original texts.

Here are some images of a printed copy of Colorpressed Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.