As Director of Technology at cultureNOW, a pilot project that I’m working on is creating a visual network map of the database (50,000 images, 2500 podcasts) for our users.

cultureNOW’s usp is the extensive database- a digital archive of historical/cultural assets across the US, Europe and India and the interconnectedness of this database.

How to show that all the historical people, sites and events are connected to each other through different degrees of separation, and in a manner that does not induce visual fatigue?

In answering this question, I am working with our dev team, to develop a visual, georeferenced representation of the cultureNOW database, as opposed to just reams of textual information that one comes across when searching content on the cultureNOW platform. I am designing the UI as well as the logic behind this representation.

Shown here is the ongoing progress through various design iterations. Presently the project is in its second stage and remains a work in progress.