I also think artists who refuse to answer questions about their work are full of shit, so (to keep me honest, or if you are impatient) you can click here for my thoughts. But please do not read this.

The WSV is not supposed to immediately make sense, and works best without me telling you What It All Means.

The Well-Sorted Version started as a programming exercise. When I saw the output with words and spaces it became an obsession. It captured my imagination in a way that's taken me years and finally seeing someone open the finished product to fully articulate. I grew up in an atheist household. I'd heard of the Bible, but it didn't sound any more interesting than any other classic literature. When people talk about books, we often talk from the perspective of the story's reality ("Juliet was bereft at Romeo's death.") rather than constantly reiterating that it's fiction ("Shakespeare wrote the character Juliet as if she was a real person who was bereft at the death of his other character Romeo.") I was 13 before I started to understand people weren't talking about the Bible this way out of convenience but out of a sincere belief that this was an actual description of real people, places, and history. The Bible had a reputation for wisdom, moral teachings, justice, compelling history, poetry, etc. but I was puzzled because I knew it also had stories about ghosts, gods, and magic spells. So I checked out a copy from the library and read it, which was the most profoundly alienating experience of my life. I couldn't then, and still can't quite now, understand why anyone would believe such an overwhelmingly ridiculous, obviously false, and morally abhorrent book.

The Well-Sorted Version captured my imagination because it recreates the alienation I felt trying to reconcile the reputation and contents of the Bible. The physical form of the book: the leather, the printing, the gilt, the ribbon, the heft, the care in typography, it all works to summon the reader's cultural associations of importance, trustworthiness, tradition. And then they open the book and the alphabetization smashes their expectations. There is no meaning, no wisdom to be found within. Their confusion about why someone would devote so much care to so little worth is my confusion over the Bible. That's what hooked me and drove me from tinkering to finally producing this. The reader feels what I did in an immediate, visceral way I can't transmit in words. I've captured my feeling in a book. The Well-Sorted Version is my experience in tangible miniature.

Some small thoughts:

This book keeps all the content but loses all the meaning. All the data is there but ordering it has made it worthless. The closer it is to perfectly regular, the less use it is; information systems are interesting because of their complexity. This is nothing new to information theory, but it's a fun example. Like any collation, though, the WSV gives a new perspective to its content. In this case the new information to be gleaned is minimal.

I like that the WSV points out how ridiculous the Bible is by being even more so, though I didn't recognize it as satire until a reader pointed it out. Working on the WSV has been a pleasant reminder that most Christians are better than their Bible. Even though it's full of terrible things that believers excuse, ignore, or minimize, people are still fundamentally good to each other. Creating the WSV helped me be a calmer angry atheist.