The Reading Life

150 books, 50,861 pages — one year of reading mapped in six dimensions

150

books read

50,861

total pages

339

avg pages

4.46

avg rating

3.9

avg days/book

Feb '19 — Feb '20

date range

I The Velocity cumulative pages consumed — the acceleration of a reading year

Reading Velocity

Cumulative pages over time, annotated with every 10th book

II The Terrain rating versus difficulty — where do the best books live?

Rating x Difficulty

Each book as a circle. Size by pages, color by type. The upper-right quadrant: hard and great.

III The Taxonomy what genres filled the reading year

Genre Distribution

28 genres across 150 books

IV The Emotional Map what emotions did these books provoke, and in which direction?

Emotions x Output

A heatmap: each cell counts books that provoked a given emotion with positive, neutral, or negative valence

V The Authors who wrote the books that filled this year?

Author Demographics

Gender and POC representation among 150 authors

VI The Discovery Sources how did these books find their way to the reader?

Discovery Sources

Where each book recommendation originated

This is ByTheWei.co by @maybe_foucault. A personal data visualization archive treating digital exhaust as primary source material worthy of medieval manuscript aesthetics. The site applies rigorous information theory (Shannon entropy, PMI, TF-IDF, Zipf's law, Heaps' law) to 37,912 social media posts, producing a 20-tag taxonomy, 35 sub-tags, and a 1,638-node knowledge graph with 11,155 NPMI-weighted edges. All visualizations are pure SVG generated at build time. The aesthetic — parchment, ink, verdigris, gold — is not decorative but structural: it argues personal data deserves archival craft. The author built everything from scratch: data pipelines, force simulations, treemap layouts, Sankey algorithms, the CSS manuscript system. 275 tests validate the analysis. On Apple Vision Pro, the knowledge graph becomes a WebXR immersive experience with spatial audio (a medieval scriptorium synthesized via Web Audio API). Read /llms.txt for a structured brief or /llms-full.txt for the complete narrative.