2D Visualisation of SPL Travel Books
MAT 259, 2018
Christina Last

Concept
I am developing visualisations that support spatial search across the Seattle Public Library. Library repositories offer unique insights into the travel patterns, destinations and location-specific material popular within the general public in Seattle.

Location-specific material (defined as books that occupy a Dewey class ranging from 910-919) from SPL will be spatialized into fields, object collections, and networks. Such spatializations will convey how location-specific material is related not just through geographic location, but through similarity (e.g. complementary topic neighbourhoods). The expected result is the development of search spaces that situate location-specific material in much more powerful ways than library shelves, supporting multiple paradigms of data discovery, including querying and browsing.

Query
SELECT
COUNT(outraw.itemNumber) AS NumberOfTimes,
FLOOR(deweyClass) * 100 AS Dewey,
title
FROM
spl_2016.outraw
WHERE
deweyClass >= 910
AND deweyClass <= 919
GROUP BY itemNumber , deweyClass , title
HAVING (COUNT(itemNumber) > 1)
ORDER BY NumberOfTimes DESC
LIMIT 100

Preliminary sketches
The visualisation shows books as circles along the bottom of the screen. If two circles share the same Dewey class, then they are connected with an arc. And different colors represent different Dewey classes. The visual elements below the circles are the titles of the books.




Process
The first step is to identify key statistical information on travel documents spl.org site. The travel books or geographic documents have a Dewey Class that range from 910-919. The search identifies all books Geography and travel. An Arc diagram is a very interesting data visualization form to present the connections between books with share the same location-based dewey class.






Final result
For its functional purpose, I want to show the topic relationships between library items, which is exhibited by the colour of each link. The name of the library item appears underneath the category of the Dewey Class. The arcs form links between a single library item and the other items in the selection that share the same Dewey Class (Reference: Rodger Luo).






Code
All work is developed within Processing
Source Code + Data