A beautiful audio and visual history of the Lomax’s journey across:
On March 31 1939, when John and Ruby Lomax left their vacation home on Port Aransas, Texas, they already had some idea of what they would encounter on their three-month, 6,502 mile journey through the southern United States collecting folk songs.
The Request Map Generator is a terrific tool. It’s made by Simon Hearne and uses the WebPageTest API.
You pop in a URL, it fetches the page and maps out all the subsequent requests in a nifty interactive diagram of circles, showing how many requests third-party scripts are themselves generating. I’ve found it to be a very effective way of showing the impact of third-party scripts to people who aren’t interested in looking at waterfall diagrams.
I was wondering… Wouldn’t it be great if this were built into browsers?
We already have a “Network” tab in our developer tools. The purpose of this tab is to show requests coming in. The browser already has all the information it needs to make a diagram of requests in the same that the request map generator does.
In Firefox, there’s a little clock icon in the bottom left corner of the “Network” tab. Clicking that shows a pie-chart view of requests. That’s useful, but I’d love it if there were the option to also see the connected circles that the request map generator shows.
Just a thought.
Correlation does not imply causation.
The Decolonial Atlas is a growing collection of maps which, in some way, help us to challenge our relationships with the land, people, and state. It’s based on the premise that cartography is not as objective as we’re made to believe.
For example: Names and Locations of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet — a cartogram showing the location of decision makers in the top 100 climate-hostile companies.
This map is a response to the pervasive myth that we can stop climate change if we just modify our personal behavior and buy more green products. Whether or not we separate our recycling, these corporations will go on trashing the planet unless we stop them.
Lighthouses of the world, mapped.
A cornucopia of interactive visualisations. You control the horizontal. You control the vertical. Networks, flocking, emergence, diffusion …it’s all here.
Isn’t this just lovely?
Cassie made a visualisation of the power we’re getting from the solar panels we installed on the roof of the Clearleft building.
I highly recommend reading her blog post about the process too. She does such a great job of explaining how she made API calls, created SVGs, and calculated animations.
Oodles and oodles of data on cities, including gorgeous animations of urban growth over time.
Some lovely data visualisation by Brendan:
The work features three main components — the threats, represented by black obelisk style objects, the system which detects and deals with these threats, represented by an organic mesh like structure, and finally the creativity that is allowed to flow because the threats have been neutralised.
This is a nifty visualisation by Hui Jing. It’s really handy to have elements categorised like this:
Chris has made sonic sparklines on his site too, but they’re far more musical than mine. Here’s his explanation of how he did it.
Recreating the original WorldWideWeb browser was an exercise in digital archeology. With a working NeXT machine in the room, Kimberly was able to examine the source code for the first every browser and discover a treasure trove within. Like this gem in HTUtils.h:
#define TCP_PORT 80 /* Allocated to http by Jon Postel/ISI 24-Jan-92 */
Sure enough, by June of 1992 port 80 was documented as being officially assigned to the World Wide Web (Gopher got port 70). Jean-François Groff—who worked on the World Wide Web project with Tim Berners-Lee—told us that this was a moment they were very pleased about. It felt like this project of theirs was going places.
Jean-François also told us that the WorldWideWeb browser/editor was kind of like an advanced prototype. The idea was to get something up and running as quickly as possible. Well, the NeXT operating system had a very robust Text Object, so the path of least resistance for Tim Berners-Lee was to take the existing word-processing software and build a hypertext component on top of it. Likewise, instead of creating a brand new format, he used the existing SGML format and added one new piece: linking with A tags.
So the WorldWideWeb application was kind of like a word processor and document viewer mashed up with hypertext. Ted Nelson complains to this day that the original sin of the web was that it borrowed this page-based metaphor. But Nelson’s Project Xanadu, originally proposed in 1974 wouldn’t become a working reality until 2014—a gap of forty years. Whereas Tim Berners-Lee proposed his system in March 1989 and had working code within a year. There’s something to be said for being pragmatic and working with what you’ve got.
The web was also a mashup of ideas. Hypertext existed long before the web—Ted Nelson coined the term in 1963. There were conferences and academic discussions devoted to hypertext and hypermedia. But almost all the existing hypertext systems—including Tim Berners-Lee’s own ENQUIRE system from the early 80s—were confined to a local machine. Meanwhile networked computers were changing everything. First there was the ARPANET, then the internet. Tim Berners-Lee’s ambitious plan was to mash up hypertext with networks.
Going into our recreation of WorldWideWeb at CERN, I knew I wanted to convey this historical context somehow.
The World Wide Web officially celebrates its 30th birthday in March of this year. It’s kind of an arbitrary date: it’s the anniversary of the publication of Information Management: A Proposal. Perhaps a more accurate date would be the day the first website—and first web server—went online. But still. Let’s roll with this date of March 12, 1989. I thought it would be interesting not only to look at what’s happened between 1989 and 2019, but also to look at what happened between 1959 and 1989.
So now I’ve got two time cones that converge in the middle: 1959 – 1989 and 1989 – 2019. For the first time period, I made categories of influences: formats, hypertext, networks, and computing. For the second time period, I catalogued notable results: browsers, servers, and the evolution of HTML.
I did a little bit of sketching and quickly realised that these converging timelines could be represented somewhat like particle collisions. Once I had that idea in my head, I knew how I would be spending my time during the hack week.
Rather than jumping straight into the collider visualisation, I took some time to make a solid foundation to build on. I wanted to be sure that the timeline itself would be understable even if it were, say, viewed in the first ever web browser.
I marked up each timeline as an ordered list of h-events:
<li class="h-event y1968">
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_%28computer_system%29" class="u-url">
<time class="dt-start" datetime="1968-12-09">1968</time>
<abbr class="p-name" title="oN-Line System">NLS</abbr>
</a>
</li>With the markup in place, I could concentrate on making it look halfway decent. For small screens, the layout is very basic—just a series of lists. When the screen gets wide enough, I lay those lists out horzontally one on top of the other. In this view, you can more easily see when events coincide. For example, ENQUIRE, Usenet, and Smalltalk all happen in 1980. But the real beauty comes when the screen is wide enough to display everthing at once. You can see how an explosion of activity in the early 90s. In 1994 alone, we get the release of Netscape Navigator, the creation of HTTPS, and the launch of Amazon.com.
The whole thing is powered by CSS transforms and positioning. Each year on a timeline has its own class that gets moved to the correct chronological point using calc(). I wanted to use translateX() but I couldn’t get the maths to work for that, so I had use plain ol’ left and right:
.y1968 {
left: calc((1968 - 1959) * (100%/30) - 5em);
}For events before 1989, it’s the distance of the event from 1959. For events after 1989, it’s the distance of the event from 2019:
.y2014 {
right: calc((2019 - 2014) * (100%/30) - 5em);
}(Each h-event has a width of 5em so that’s where the extra bit at the end comes from.)
I had to do some tweaking for legibility: bunches of events happening around the same time period needed to be separated out so that they didn’t overlap too much.
As a finishing touch, I added a few little transitions when the page loaded so that the timeline fans out from its centre point.
I fiddled with the content a bit after peppering Robert Cailliau with questions over lunch. And I got some very valuable feedback from Jean-François. Some examples he provided:
1971: Unix man pages, one of the first instances of writing documents with a markup language that is interpreted live by a parser before being presented to the user.
1980: Usenet News, because it was THE everyday discussion medium by the time we created the web technology, and the Web first embraced news as a built-in information resource, then various platforms built on the web rendered it obsolete.
1982: Literary Machines, Ted Nelson’s book which was on our desk at all times
I really, really enjoyed building this “collider” timeline. It was a chance for me to smash together my excitement for web history with my enjoyment of using the raw materials of the web; HTML and CSS in this case.
The timeline pales in comparison to the achievement of the rest of the team in recreating the WorldWideWeb application but I was just glad to be able to contribute a little something to the project.
Rob has turned his exhaustive spreadsheet of all the concerts he has attended into a beautiful website. Browse around—it’s really quite lovely!
Rob’s also writing about the making of the site over on his blog.
Minimalist cartography.
I quite like Phil’s idea of having charts like this. It might be a fun project for Homebrew Website Club to do something like this for my site.
While a geographical map is helpful if you want to find your way around the world, a population cartogram is the representation that we need if we want to know where our fellow humans are at home.
A lovely bit of data visualisation from Nadieh showing the differences and commonalities in constellations across cultures. As always, she’s written up the process too.
Typography meets astronomy in 16th century books like the Astronomicum Caesareum.
It is arguably the most typographically impressive scientific manual of the sixteenth century. Owen Gingerich claimed it, “the most spectacular contribution of the book-maker’s art to sixteenth-century science.”
Tutorials for recreating classics of generative art with JavaScript and canvas.
A blog dedicated to data visualisation, all part of ongoing research for a book on Charles-Joseph Minard.
Data visualisation, interactive media and computational design are one focus of my work, but I also do research in the history of maps and diagrams.