Making Visible the Invisible DataVis at the Seattle Public Library

George Legrady
University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)
Media Arts & Technology

The presentation will begin with an introduction to the “Making Visible the Invisible” installation at the Seattle Public Library, an artwork that maps on 6 large LCD screens, the activities of library checkouts received by the hour. Begun in September 2005, the installation may be the longest continuously running data visualization project.
The second half of the presentation will focus on student work created using the over 78 million datasets collected to-date by the Seattle Library Project. I have used the data in my Data Visualization Course for the past 8 years. Students acquire skillsets in a ten week period to analyze the data with MySQL and create various types of visualizations in 2D and 3D.

Presentation (PDF File)

Back to Workshop I: Culture Analytics Beyond Text: Image, Music, Video, Interactivity and Performance