The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a text I’ve worked with already in the past.

This time I was intrigued by the simple yet super cool typed.js javascript library, which simulates animated typing.

After testing it out a bit I realised that this approach allows to focus on the text with more attention that having it all displayed at once.

Since the words appear one at a time, it feels more like a verbal dialogue than reading. As a consequence, also the way the meaning of the text gets perceived changes.

Slower, deeper. Almost like meditating. Try it out here.

Credits

The javaScript InfoVis Toolkit includes a number of pretty cool libraries that work in the browser and can be customised to your own needs. Some of these visualisations are specifically designed for trees and graphs, so I always wondered how a dynamic tree-rendering of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus would look like.

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Latin for “Logical-Philosophical Treatise”) is the only book-length philosophical work published by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his lifetime. It was an ambitious project: to identify the relationship between language and reality and to define the limits of science. It is recognized as a significant philosophical work of the twentieth century.
[…] The Tractatus employs a notoriously austere and succinct literary style. The work contains almost no arguments as such, but rather declarative statements which are meant to be self-evident. The statements are hierarchically numbered, with seven basic propositions at the primary level (numbered 1–7), with each sub-level being a comment on or elaboration of the statement at the next higher level (e.g., 1, 1.1, 1.11, 1.12).

The final result is available here (warning: it’s been tested only on Chrome and Firefox): http://hacks.michelepasin.org/witt/spacetree

Some more details

I’ve played around a little with one of the visualisation libraries the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit makes available, the Radial Graph, to the purpose of transforming the Tractatus text into a more interactive platform. The Radial Graph is essentially a tree-rendering library built over a circular area (hence called also space-tree).

I liked the idea of making the tree-like structure of the text explorable one step at a time, within a framework that suggests a predefined order of the text-units but also allows for lateral steps or quick jumps to other sections. However I’m still trying to figure out what the advantages of looking at the text this way can be, once you go past the initial excitement of playing with it as if it was some sort of toy!

Some of the pros seem to be:

On the other hand, here are some cons:

I wonder how all of this could be developed further and/or transformed into a useful tool.. if you have any comment or suggestion please do get in touch !
I’m also planning to release the source code for the whole app as soon as a I clean it up a little; for the moment, here is the javascript bit that renders the graph:

Well today I sort of run into it by change, and I really liked it! Isn’t that a good feeling when you realize the things you’ve done in the past did actually make some sense?

…

From their site:

“Our aim is to ensure that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy continues to play a fertile and creative role in 21st century thought. The Society aspires to provide, through its annual conference, a British focal point for research and exchange of ideas among Wittgenstein scholars and students throughout the world. It will also seek to address, in its conference themes, the many other disciplines (psychology, anthropology, sociology, education sciences, aesthetics etc.) that Wittgenstein’s work has impacted and will continue to impact.

The BWS will make an annual bursary available to a student who wishes to pursue PhD research on Wittgenstein at the University of Hertfordshire.

The British Wittgenstein Society is sponsored by Shell.”

It has been a last minute invitation for PhiloSURFical, but it’s even more appreciated! And by peeping at the conference program, I realized there’s another hypertextual version of the Tractatus: the one created by Luciano Bazzochi from the university of Pisa…