Wired
A lecturer from Newcastle University has developed a method for mapping websites and turning their hidden data into intricate artworks. The visualisations capture websites frozen at a specific point in time and show navigational links that a user can see, along with buried links to code, images, videos and external links.
Over the past ten years Martin Dade Robertson has been building a software application called Data Cartographer, which chews up data from a specific website and creates an image from it. The data is gathered using a web crawler -- similar to those used by search engines -- to track and map all links within a URL.
The artworks are plotted out using a "force directed graph". They contain nodes representing all the site's components, and all the lines that stretch between them represent the hyperlinks. The software allows users to edit their images in post-production in order to adjust the colours and line weights.
Read more
No comments:
Post a Comment