Beatles History Explorer (2013)

beatles history explorerClick image to open the demo website in a new window
(This public demo does not allow playing the music tracks and only displays pixelated cover images to avoid copyright issues.)

Challenge

Music collections usually grow over time. How can this change be appropriately visualized?

Solution

Change collection map only as little as possible to incorporate new tracks and cross-fade between consecutive map versions using animations.

Core Technologies

  • map generation and incremental updates: (landmark) multidimensional scaling (MDS) combined with Procrustes analysis, incremental growing self-organizing map (GSOM), stochastic neighbor embedding (SNE), neighbor retrieval visualizer (NeRV)
  • backend implementation: Java, Python
  • frontend implementation: HTML5 (jQuery)