Orange and Brown shapes. An alternating color pattern spells out B A a a A D in binary

Books as Art, Art as Data

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Books as Art, Art as Data was created by graduate students from the Pratt Institute’s School of Information, as part of a class project for the course INFO-659, Advanced Projects in Digital Humanities.  The project explores the collections, exhibitions, and institutional history of our partner, the Center for Book Arts, through analysis of data the CBA has collected across its 50 year history. Explore the site to learn more about Artists’ Books, the CBA, and our project methods, and check out the gallery below for a glimpse into the project!

Project Gallery:
Each photo links to a page about a project component!

Graphic title card with the words ‘Center for Book Arts, interactive timeline’. The graphics are composed of screenshot demos and elements from a web page, showing data visualizations of barcharts, network graphs, and descriptive paragraphs.
Interactive timeline tool to explore the data from the Center for Book Arts for 50 years.
Text graphic with the words 'The Binding Threads of New York City' in a vintage, distressed typewriter style font. The word 'city' is highlighted within a rectangular outline, tilted slightly.
Exploring the connections that weave together the fabric of New York City, one story at a time.
An image of an unfolded 8 page zine about the process of making the project
A still image of the unfolded project process zine, which is available to be downloaded
A vertical treemap of subject terms related to artist's books.
Exploring the connections of the field of an artist’s book and its influence with text, in this case, its subject categories
A t-SNE plot of objects in the CBA's collection, based on description text and subject terms. Points are colored based on the objects' manually-assigned Object Type category within the collection. Some Object Types show clear clustering, while others are widely distributed; and some clusters are clearly composed of numerous Object Types.
A cluster analysis (t-SNE plot) showing “similarity” and “difference” between objects in the CBA’s collection, based on the words used in their descriptions and subject labels.