Visualizing Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire

Physical Object, Data Visualization

Vladimir Nabokov's novel, Pale Fire begs (or at least it seems to me) to be turned into a data visualization. Composed of a 999 line poem broken into four cantos and a long section of notes referring to the poem, Pale Fire understands itself as a whole—yet its maze of intertextual notes is often too complex to move beyond. I wanted to create a visualization that would allow the entire work to be seen and understood at once. I eventually created a small glass object that gave the novel depth and retained its complexities while also allowing the user to view large patterns within the work.