Much of our work at KITAB involves comparing books in order to understand their relationships. Our main tool for this is the passim software, which detects passages two texts have in common (here are some of our blogs about passim: 1, 2, 3, 4). passim produces a lot of data about each pair of passages, including where exactly in both books these passages are found, and how many words and characters the shared passage contains in either book.

For each pair of books, this data is collected in a csv file, which can be loaded into a spreadsheet. In this form, the data is not very human-reader-friendly. In order for us to get an understanding of what all these rows and rows of data mean for the relationship between two books, we use visualizations.