Overview
Paul Jones, the director of the iBiblio project at UNC Chapel Hill, gave RENCI his data on people querying the iBiblio collections and said “be creative.” iBiblio is one of the largest collections of information avaialble on the Internet and includes literature, art, music, software, history and more. Jones wanted to visualize the way people interact with his site in a way that had never seen before.
The results went well beyond expectations. This visualization was originally shown on the RENCI Showcase Room visualization dome at the UNC Chapel Hill Engagement Center.
Two factors that affect traffic on a web network that includes multiple sites and that hosts large amounts of data are cross-site traffic (where sites in the same network link to each other), and search engine indexing hits. This visualization looks at both of these factors to see how they relate to each other, and to understand each individually. Each circle represents one of the sites hosted by iBiblio. Lines connecting circles mean that more than a quarter of all incoming IP addresses are shared by the connected sites. The larger the circle, the more hits the website gets. Inside the circle are measures of how many crawls the site has received. If a pie in the circle extends beyond the border of the circle, that site has received more indexer crawls than human visits.
Project Team
Jeff Heard
Partner
Paul Jones, UNC Chapel Hill/iBiblio
