Books do furnish a room…
Working with a data set provided by Aaron Swartz, who runs theinfo.org, and who had built a list of 735,323 books by crawling Amazon, Chris Harrison built a spatial layout– a huge mosaic of books. Items that were noted as being similar were grouped and color-coded. The result, a “map” of the scope of Amazon’s offerings. Readers can scroll down to see the detail of the mosaic (book covers)… and will see, in the summary graph toward the bottom of the page, that the results conform pretty precisely to power curve dimensions– that’s to say, like “the Long Tail” (which describes purchasing behavior).
(See other nifty visualizations by Chris here.)
As we diagram our own desires, we might recall that it was on this date in 1509 that the Indian emperor Krishnadeva Raya was crowned, beginning a reign that marked the zenith of the Vijayanagara Empire.
