Organic Visualization of Document Evolution

Recent availability of data of writing processes at keystroke-granularity has enabled research on the evolution of document writing. A natural step is to develop systems that can actually show this data and make it understandable. Here we propose a data structure that captures a document’s fine-grained history and an organic visualization that serves as an interface to it. We evaluate a proof-of-concept implementation of the system through a pilot study with documents written by students at a public university. Our results are promising and reveal facets such as general strategies adopted, local edition density and hierarchical structure of the final text.