Description
"The Preservation of Favoured Traces" by Ben Fry (Fathom Information Design), created in 2009 for the 150th anniversary of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" and held in the Cooper Hewitt collection. The project visualizes the evolution of the book across its six editions (1859-1872), showing Darwin's revisions, additions, and deletions color-coded by edition number. Rather than mapping chapter structure, the visualization tracks how the text itself changed through each revision — revealing that Darwin rewrote roughly 75% of the sentences from the first to sixth edition, substantially reshaping his argument in response to critics.
