While I was going through my daily reading I saw this post on the Tufte site about a new visualization technique for multi-author documents. The technique is called History Flow and was created by the folks over at IBM.
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history flow provides answers at a glance to questions like, Has a community contributed to the text or has it been mostly written by a single author? How much has a particular contributor influenced the current version of the document? Is the text's evolution marked by spurts of intense revision activity or does it reflect a smooth transition from its beginning to the present?
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While the author of this visualization technique uses Wiki’s as an example, I immediately thought that this would be a great way to see changes in something like Visual Source Safe. Hmmm, maybe Eric will add this into SourceGear. You could have the History Flow view on top and a slider to traverse the history and another window that shows the document with the document color coded by author. If you check out the Community view you’ll get an ideal of what I’m thinking of.