Team: Matthew Battles Jeffrey Schnapp Alexander Horak James Yamada
The Book Biography Machine is a web application that scholars may use to map the diffusion of published works across time and geopolitical space using bibliographic information that is either uploaded as a spreadsheet or pulled from WorldCat through the application interface.
A book’s place of publication is represented across the horizontal axes, while its date of publication is represented on the vertical axis. Users may zoom, orbit and pan between representations of published works in 3d space.
Bibliographic sets may be visualized individually or comparatively. For example, the diffusion of Adam Smith’s work may be compared against that of Karl Marx. Sets may also be curated in-situ and downloaded as spreadsheets for further refinement or later visualization, allowing scholars to use visualization as part of their work’s process rather than its final output.
A modified version of the Book Biography Machine has been presented at the Renaissance Society of America as a tool used in a comparative study of The Divine Comedy’s diffusion as a printed work versus a written manuscript.