The purpose of this project is to show the correlation between popular items and dewey. To see how top 30 popular items locate in dewey categories, I plot the checkout amount of each item by month during 2006-2011.

select month(o), dewey, count(*),title ,kind from kind, activity, title, dewey where dewey >0 and dewey.bib = activity.bib and kind.item = activity.item and title.bib = activity.bib and month(o) = 1 and year(o) = 2008 group by title order by month(o) , count(*) DESC limit 30 ;

First, I query the top popular 30 items from Seattle Public Library once a month, and then save all seventy-two months in five data files: month, kind, title, dewey, and count. In Processing, I just read those files, and analyze them first in setup function .

There are four different mode of this program. The height of each sphere represents the checkout number, and spheres are plot in different months and dewey numbers. I changed some sphere details and also frame rate in order to speed up the program. First mode is colored by different dewey numbers. As you can see, the most popular items are around dewey number “700.”

Second one is colored by different kinds. By this mode, it is obvious that most popular items are CDs.

Third one is colored by rank.

Forth one is text mode. Titles are shown, and the height represents lasting time that it stayed in top 30.

I used Processing and Peasycam.

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Source Code

Color Mode
1: Dewey
2: kind
3: Rank
4: Text Mode