This parallel coordinates visualization of Piers Plowman Manuscripts traces several features of the manuscript corpus in a succession of sliders that can be activated by clicking on an axis and dragging the mouse to highlight a section of the axis. The selection can be refined by clicking and dragging the top or bottom, and the whole selection can be slid up and down the axis to highlight various manuscript trajectories. You may activate sliders on as many axes as you choose, and you can reset a single slider by reducing its selection to zero or erase them all by reloading the page.
A single line traces a single manuscript's stats across each of the axes.
The first two axes trace the earliest and latest possible dates for a MS's production according to A.V.C. Schmidt's dating in his parallel text edition. Some liberties have been taken to make the relative dating periods numerical, thus "early fifteenth century" is expressed as 1400-1415, while "mid fifteenth century" is expressed as 1440-1460.
The second two axes chart the position of Piers in the MS relative to all the works contained in it. The number for "position" indicates in which spot Piers is placed, thus "2" means Piers is second out of however many works in the MS. The top end represents the Vernon MS, but could not be represented numerically without the scale making the majority of data illegible. Thus, while the Vernon has over 370 works, and Piers comes near the end of them, this has been reduced to 30 out of 40 simply to mark the Vernon as the high end without completely obscuring the information for all the other MSS.
The next two sliders represent two numbers that are of particular importance to me. They trace the number of lines of Piers poetry (usually ranging from 2500 to 7000) and relate that directly to how much of the manuscript Piers happens to occupy. As I show elsewhere in my research, there is a strong correlation between longer forms of the poem taking up more of the manuscripts, and not necessarily because they would be inconvenient to compile (as at least four of them appear in compilations).
The second axis from the right (or 7th in order) is an unusual axis that attempts to turn geospatial information into a numerical scale. I have used arbitrary data points inside each of the regions from which MSS show signs of origination to "represent" the whole region. I have also chosen Malvern itself as the point of origin from which to measure distance because of both the strong clustering of the corpus in the Southwest Midlands (and specifically in Southwest Worcestershire), and Malvern Hills' being the location of Will's own origin. Some MSS cannot be located anywhere in particular, so I have arbitrarily chosen to place them at 70 miles from origin, 70 representing half the distance between Malvern and London. It is a generous radius with a high probability of containing most of the manuscripts in question.
The final axis is a number scale that assigns a number to each of the different textual varieties according to this rubric:
The code below has been modified from that of Mike Bostock's Parallel Coordinates Block (http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/7586334).