On the occasion of the recent fifth birthday of this blog, we thought a bit about the archival nature of the whole enterprise. With (almost) daily updates about fresh projects from visualization and information aesthetics, about 1950 different projects have been described and documented up to now. So here [moritz.stefaner.eu] is a first step towards making this growing archive more accessible: a custom adaptation of the elastic lists principle for the 1950 posts of infosthetics.com.
Here is how it works: The little tiles on the left represent the individual posts, with color stripes representing their categories. You can find a color legend in the category filter on the right. In addition, you will find filters for the number of comments, year and author. Clicking one of the filter entries will display only matching posts, and also update the number of items for each filter accordingly. If you click a post, you can see its details on the bottom, and visit it by clicking the preview. In addition, the filter values that belong to this post are marked with a grey background.
The little bar charts in each filter show you the relative number of posts in the current filter context (red bar) compared to the overall percentage (grey bar) – so, in the example above, you can see that for the selected category infographic the number of comments is slightly higher than usual and the posts seem to be more recent overall.
There is certainly room for improvement (keyword search, represent links between projects…), but we thought it would be good to share it anyways – so try it out and let us know what you think! Do you think this is worth pursuing, and which other browsing options/modes could be interesting to you?
(Note by infosthetics: Best birthday present ever! Thnkx Moritz!)