Interactive Web Prototype: The Gradient Blob

• Date: 2020
• Media: web prototype

One of three projects for my MFA thesis, this is an exploration focused on Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), a system that gives electronically-published articles a unique point of reference. DOIs can be harnessed in a number of ways, from directly connecting online articles to the materials in their reference lists to providing metrics on the extent each article is cited by other articles. In this exploration, the DOIs of several years’ worth of Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific articles are converted into colors and presented as a timeline, visualizing the evolution of the journal’s electronic publishing process but also the ways that its publisher organized its wider process for other journals. This timeline is presented as an Adobe XD interactive web page prototype: http://bit.do/the-gradient-blob.