• 2008
• Domain
• Exhibit map

Designed by artist and computer scientist Martin Wattenberg and computational designer Fernanda B. Viégas, the History Flow visualization technique helps reveal complex records of contributions and collaborations. Among other uses, it can be applied to show the evolution of documents—e.g., Wikipedia entries created by people all over the world. This map shows the edit history of the Wikipedia entry on “Abortion.” A list of color-coded contributing authors to this entry is given on the left. The graph in the middle shows the History Flow visualization where each version of the entry is represented by a vertical line, sorted in time, from left to right. Text contributed by a specific author is represented as a color-coded, horizontal band. Bands are coded by thickness according to the length of the text contributed to a specific version. The right column shows the entry as of April 20th, 2003, at 5:32p.m., color-coded according to the author of the final edit. As the map illustrates, the page has been edited by many different authors and has survived several complete deletions.