Presented here is an ongoing exploration of Charles Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’ and Ruth Padel’s ‘Darwin, A Life In Poems’.

I initially separated the text of these two books into nouns verbs, adjectives & other. I wanted to present a visual map of how a scientist and a poet use language – a look at how much each author used real world names (Nouns) and more abstract terminology (Verb, Adjective and Other) in their writings.

I found the nouns specifically interesting and created ‘frequency poems’ based on Darwin’s and Padel’s books. These are the most frequently occurring nouns in the texts and I feel create a unique portrait of both types of literature.

Once I had a count of the 153535 words used in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, I set about drawing a dot for every word