I just read an interesting article in Discover Magazine titled Map: Evolution Evolving which discusses a project that visualizes the evolution of the entry for evolution on Wikipedia. Using their History Flow Visualization Application IBM’s Watson Research Center produced the image below which shows the activity surrounding this single entry which started out at a scant 526 words has been altered 2,081 times by 68 editors between December 2001 and last October and now weighs in at around 11,000 words.
Being able to analyze how a document has evolved is useful in determining key events in a document’s life and the History Flow authors also point out that the tool “provides answers at a glance to questions like, Has a community contributed to the text or has it been mostly written by a single author? How much has a particular contributor influenced the current version of the document? Is the text’s evolution marked by spurts of intense revision activity or does it reflect a smooth transition from its beginning to the present?” There’s a good explanation of how History Flow works and what kinds of results are produced. The History Flow gallery also shows some very interesting examples. The main History Flow site has sections that link to the download executables – all you need is JRE 1.4 or higher to run it.
