It’s a problem you hear over and over again. A large collection of material, in this case the National Archives of Australia, is digitized and computerized so that the entire collection is at your fingertips at a moment’s notice. However, as the digital collection grows it becomes more and more difficult to actually find anything as you drown in the mountain of data. This case has a happy ending as Michell Whitelaw has developed a pair of downloadable visualizations for visualizing the massive collection.
The first, “Series Browser”, organizes the collection into Agencies (the organization responsible for what’s in the document) and Series, and visualizes it as a hierarchical collection of two-tone boxes where the inner area is proportional to the number of items and the outer area is proportional to the shelf meters used. It provides a powerful of visualizing the size of certain collections.
The other, “A1 Explorer”, is a classic text visualization operationg on word frequency of item titles. It contains a classic histogram of word frequency, but also connects words into frequent combinations and co-occurences.
Both visualizations can be downloaded from his site, and run on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
The Visible Archive, via The Visible Archive: Mapping the National Archives of Australia Collection – information aesthetics.
