Nature archive visualized - draft

I'm using up my annual carry-over vacation days by taking some time off work this week. Normal people probably use this valuable breathing space to bond with their loved ones, play badminton and learn exciting new hobbies. So far I've sat alone in my flat for thirty six hours straight writing Processing sketches *.

So... here's a draft visualization (14mb MP4, should play in your browser with Quicktime) of the key words and phrases found in Nature journal over the past thirty years.

The video starts with the phrases from 1970 and continues until 2007.

Phrases appear on the right in the year that they were first seen, then travel leftwards, disappearing in the year they were last seen.

The size of each phrase is related to how often it was seen relative to all the other phrases.

The hue of each phrase is related to how many distinct journal issues it appeared in - green / yellow phrases are relatively transient while red / brown phrases are stable, appearing in many different contexts.

The data is incomplete (it's a bit sparse after '88) and I took lots of shortcuts to see how things might look, so don't read too much into which phrases appear and when for now... a better version will follow - this is just a release early, release often draft.

Eventually I'd like to have a sort of Pop-up Video timeline of science from the 50s till today, with major events (and relevant terms) flashing up on screen.

If you're particularly impatient here's a version from Vimeo. The quality is rubbish, mainly because I munged the file with iMovie (which is crap) to add some rockin' beats. I still suggest you get the mp4 instead, though.

Tommorrow I'm going to the park.



* I watched Rendition, too, it was quite good.