The Dickinson Sublime is an interactive 3D visualization mapping Emily Dickinson's 1,775 poems. It uses machine-learned embeddings to cluster related poems in space, with nodes colored by theme and links connecting works that share motifs.
Explorable 3D Map of Dickinson's Poems
• This project generates 384‑dimensional sentence embeddings for each poem via Hugging Face’s all-MiniLM-L6-v2 API, averages them into three dimensions, and positions poems as nodes in 3D space for thematic clustering.
• Three.js renders each node in a dynamic WebGL scene, styled via Tailwind CSS for responsive layout. Users can rotate, zoom, and pan the map on desktop or mobile for seamless exploration of Dickinson’s poem network.
• Edges link poems to their two nearest neighbors and those sharing major motifs, while node sizes scale by connection count to highlight central works. Clicking a node opens a modal with the full poem for deeper insight.
SAMPLE POEM STRUCTURE:
{
id: 4,
date: 1853,
stanzas: [{
0: "On this wondrous sea",
1: "Sailing silently,",
2: "Ho! Pilot, ho!"
}, {
0: "Knowest thou the shore",
1: "Where no breakers roar -",
2: "Where the storm is o'er?"
}, {
0: "In the peaceful west",
1: "Many the sails at rest -",
2: "The anchors fast -",
3: "Thither I pilot thee -",
4: "Land Ho! Eternity!",
5: "Ashore at last!"
}],
emphases: [{
word: "thee",
stanzaIndex: 2,
lineIndex: 3,
position: 3
}]
}
How It Works: Embedding and Visualization Overview
Animated Emphasis Highlighting in Poems
• As each poem node renders, highlighted words animate in sequence—echoing Emily Dickinson’s original emphasis—to bring emotional cadence and visual life to the text.