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The Vector Space

“Intellectual paint program” enabling users to literally draw connections between essays published in an experimental academic journal.

Year 2005
Format
Web application
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The Vector Space is an “intellectual paint program” in which users draw “vectors,” freehand lines which represent individual essays in the experimental academic journal Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular. Multiple visual interpretations can then be applied to the drawings, revealing unexpected interconnections between the essays.

Video Traversal

A high quality recording of the work as a user might experience it.


Users select a project and then click and drag to draw a vector representing its intellectual force.
Each project has its own look and feel, and project vectors from different issues of the journal can be drawn in the same space.
Once drawn, vectors can be interpreted in various ways--shown here is the “intersections” display, which shows keywords that intersecting projects have in common.
This is the “textracts” display, which mixes short excerpts from the text of all the projects together in the same space.