All entries tagged: Tim Schwartz
The first sketches of history
If newspapers are the first draft of history, then consider these the first sketches.
In the video above, San Diego developer and artist Tim Schwartz shows off several visualizations of history he created with The New York Times’ entire 158-year corpus as his dataset. They are alternately quirky, beautiful, and probing — hundreds of millions of words synthesized into coherent, historical portraits.
I met Schwartz earlier this month at Times Open, the newspaper’s conference for developers. He was interested in the Times’ newly released APIs, which could help facilitate his work while expanding the potential for analysis. (However, they only go back to 1981.) And while there are many potential uses for the APIs, the most exciting so far have focused on representing history through the pages of the Times, transforming piles of newsprint into informative art. Or maybe we should call it artistic journalism. In any event, it’s a step up from papier-mâché.
The emerging field of visualizing newspapers appears to have just a few practitioners, but the Times APIs are likely to spread the craft. In fact, you can participate right now with a fun little application built by Derek Gottfrid, a senior software architect at the Times. It’s a proof-of-concept — not high art — that lets you chart mentions of any two words in the Times for each month of 2008. I’ve been playing around with visually interesting pairs like the two below. Let me know what you find.
