In the past, I have prof­ited immensely from using open source projects, fore­most flare, but also many other libraries. I would like to give some­thing back by open sourc­ing my favorite toy, the Elas­tic Lists project on github: github.com/MoritzStefaner/Elastic-Lists.

Have fun with it! Please keep in mind I am not a devel­oper by train­ing and these are side projects. Espe­cially excuse the sketchy doc­u­men­ta­tion. So if you start work­ing with the code, and run into issues, feel free to file bug reports or add ques­tions to the FAQ.

Heck, and while I am at it, why not pub­lish revisit as well: github.com/MoritzStefaner/revisit

On the occa­sion of the recent fifth birth­day of infosthetics.com blog, your pre­mier source for fresh projects from visu­al­iza­tion and infor­ma­tion aes­thet­ics, I made a cus­tom adap­ta­tion of the elas­tic lists prin­ci­ple for the – up to now – 1950 posts of the site. Try it out, and read more about it here.

Happy birth­day infosthetics!

Today was a good day, so I thought I would share its results imme­di­ately, instead of fine-tuning for­ever — who knows when I find the time anyways!

I built a lit­tle facet browser for the New York Times Arti­cle Search API - an impres­sively fast faceted search engine cov­er­ing over two mil­lion arti­cles. So, give it a spin!

Some caveats:

• Don’t look for the page nav­i­ga­tion — there is none. Pure lazi­ness, will update it soon.
• The ini­tial counts are based on a search for “the” (which I fig­ured would appear in all arti­cles). Unfor­tu­nately, only the top 15 or so val­ues per facet are returned, so you can­not click, e.g. the year 2008 in the begin­ning. Will fix.
• The API has a request limit of 5000 queries per day. So if your requests don’t work — come back tomor­row morning :)
• Unfor­tu­nately, the API seems to sup­port only one value per facet. So, all facets are single-select.(fixed, see comments).

The code is based on my totally revamped elas­tic lists pro­to­type. I used this project as a lit­tle sand­box exper­i­ment of how easy cus­tomiza­tion is pos­si­ble, and espe­cially how to make a switch from a fully client-based to a server–based fil­ter­ing model.

Just a short post, but another demo is online.

It is a demon­stra­tion of the “elas­tic list” prin­ci­ple for brows­ing multi-facetted data struc­tures. Click any num­ber of list entries to query the data­base for a com­bi­na­tion of the selected attrib­utes. If you cre­ate an “impos­si­ble” con­fig­u­ra­tion, your selec­tion will be reduced until a match is possible.

The exam­ple data is based on the Noble prize win­ners dataset used in the Fla­menco facet browser.

Elas­tic lists enhance tra­di­tional facet brows­ing approaches by • visu­al­iz­ing rel­a­tive pro­por­tions (weights) of meta­data val­ues by size • visu­al­iz­ing unusu­al­ness of a meta­data weight by bright­ness • and ani­mated fil­ter­ing transitions.

In unfil­tered view, the bright­ness shows a trend mea­sure, indi­cat­ing a ris­ing num­ber of prices of the last years.

In fil­tered views, a brighter back­ground indi­cates a higher weight of the meta­data value com­pared to the over­all distribution.

If, for instance, you click “peace” as in the exam­ple above, you will see that “female” and “Switzer­land” are much brighter, indi­cat­ing that the pro­por­tion of women and Swiss is much higher in this con­text than com­pared to the whole data set. That’s inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion and could also be used to char­ac­ter­ize the result set of a key­word query or any other col­lec­tion in terms of its “char­ac­ter­is­tic” meta­data val­ues. Besides that, it fos­ters under­stand­ing of how meta­data val­ues are cor­re­lated with each other, which is often inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion itself.

You can also switch on lit­tle sparklines to see the tem­po­ral dis­tri­b­u­tion of each meta­data value: