First Collaborative Sentence: Remixed

I scraped, edited and rebuilt a million-word web artwork as a website where the text does the work.

Brief

Douglas Davis's The World's First Collaborative Sentence is an archival web art piece held by the Whitney Museum of American Art: a single sentence of more than one million words. My brief: make it a readable website, using the role of the editor as a framework, with the text kept simple and free of derogatory words.

01Scrape

The source was an open forum before open forums had any regulation, far too long to read word by word.

Anyone could add to it, so it is a colourful mix of poetry, nonsense, confessions and jokes, with some problematic entries. Scraping it took a Python script and a whole lot of time. Deciding what to do with it was harder, so editing had to become a system.

The top of the original page on the Whitney's artport: the title, then an unbroken wall of contributors' text in all caps, mixed fonts and languages — Fig. 1The sentence as it lived online, and as plain text once scraped.

The scraped sentence as plain lowercase text in a code editor, one line at a time, with the minimap showing how long the file runs — Fig. 1The sentence as it lived online, and as plain text once scraped.

02Edit

Banned words are blurred rather than removed, so the editor's hand stays visible.

The list mixed words I found myself with research into commonly banned words and ideas. Deleting them would have pretended the sentence was “cleaner” than it was.

Blurring keeps it intact and shows a decision was made, and kept raising the project's real question: where curating ends and censorship begins, when one editor decides for many contributors.

A paragraph of the sentence before the banned word pass: plain black monospace text on white, with nothing marked — Fig. 2Before and after the banned word pass, on placeholder text.

The same paragraph after the banned word pass, with several words replaced by soft blurred blocks of colour — Fig. 2Before and after the banned word pass, on placeholder text.

03Design

One typeface and two colours, so the volume of text reads as a texture rather than a layout.

The type is set in Inconsolata, in two weights. A gradient through the text and a gradient cursor make a very long page feel alive without adding anything to read. I decided typography, interaction and rendering first, then built to them with agentic workflows.

Design system board: the colour rules, a type specimen, component examples and the three colour roles — Fig. 3The design system. Three colour roles run horizontally across the page and decide which gradient appears.

On white

On black

Fig. 4The gradient cursor, which replaces the system cursor, on white and black.

04Scroll

The site scrolls itself at 40 pixels a second, because nobody was expected to read a million words by hand.

I optimised rendering so the whole sentence scrolls smoothly. At about six characters per word, roughly six million characters, scroll time depends mainly on screen width. The colophon and credits stay tucked away until opened, so the page stays a single stream of words.

Screen	Columns per row	Time to scroll
1920px wide	230	about 4h 21m
1440px wide	170	about 5h 53m
1280px wide	150	about 6h 40m
390px phone	42	about 23h 49m

Fig. 5The colophon, out of the way until the reader seeks it out.

Results

1M+ words, scrolling smoothly
in the browser

What I learned

Editing is a design tool. Blurring a word keeps the decision, and the process, visible, which is more honest than deleting it and pretending the sentence came out clean.