Link for this post: "A Few Thousand Science Fiction Covers: An Experimental Interface"
When I was a kid growing up in LA in the 1950′s, I used to take a bus to the downtown area of LA from the San Fernando Valley. In those days, it had a string of used bookstores filled with stacks of old comic books, paperbacks and magazines. Among them were science fiction magazines. At various times I collected comics, sci fi paperbacks and the magazines as well. If I had my collections today, I would be a rich man.
I gave them to younger boys as I "outgrew them." This creative interface to exploring the old magazine covers brings me back to those days examining lurid pictures of bug-eyed monsters and green-tinged aliens decorating the rapidly deteriorating pulp magazines.
The way this interface was done by the author:
The 3,448 covers you see are arranged horizontally by time, with earlier covers to the left, and more recent covers to the right. The covers are arranged vertically by hue. How this interface was made Data for this interface was prepared using Perl and the ImageMagick library. Space-filling was implemented (with visual feedback) using Processing (p5).
The interface itself is presented in Flash/Actionscript within a PHP webpage. I downloaded information about all the covers by screen-scraping the Visco archive using a Perl program. Then I downloaded all the thumbnails (again with Perl), and analysed them for color, using ImageMagick to reduce each image to 1×1 and recording the color of the remaining pixel. I then mapped the covers to time/hue, which produced the following layout, which I visualized in Processing …
If I was a programmer, that would be completely understandable. Alas I am not. This post by way of populicio.us new links.
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