IBM's History Flow tool is a visualization tool for a time-sequence of snapshots of a document in various stages of its creation. The tool supports tracking contributions to the article by different users, and can identify which parts of a document have remained unchanged over the course of many full-document revisions. The tool was developed by Fernanda Viégas

Fernanda Viégas

Fernanda Bertini Viégas is a Brazilian scientist and designer whose work focuses on the social, collaborative, and artistic aspects of information visualization. Viégas received a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab in 2005. The same year she began work at the Cambridge location...

 of the MIT Media Lab

MIT Media Lab

The MIT Media Lab is a laboratory of MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Devoted to research projects at the convergence of design, multimedia and technology, the Media Lab has been widely popularized since the 1990s by business and technology publications such as Wired and Red Herring for a...

 and Martin Wattenberg and Kushal Dave of IBM.

Without explicitly referencing it, the history flow's visualization mechanism is mainly based on the transclusion beams mechanism that was introduced by Ted Nelson

Ted Nelson

Theodor Holm Nelson is an American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1963 and published it in 1965...

 to show Transclusion

Transclusion

In computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of a document or part of a document into another document by reference.For example, an article about a country might include a chart or a paragraph describing that country's agricultural exports from a different article about agriculture...

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IBM Research has done an analysis of Wikipedia usage and edits using a history flow tool.