Starry, Starry Night

Rhizome are longtime "digidons" ... heck, half our stories usually come from their mailouts. Supporting the online art community with "nous, revous and cho, chous" they have launched a new section on their site to gauge the popularity of certain stories based on a brightness of a "dynamic star".

I'll let them explain it better: "Each time someone reads an article on the Rhizome web site a dim star appears on a black web page. When an article gets read again, the corresponding star gets a bit brighter. Over time, the web page comes to resemble a starry night sky, with bright stars and dim stars corresponding to more popular and less popular articles." Simple.

Called "StarryNight", it links each star to the article it represents, and connects related stars into visible constellations. "StarryNight represents a totally new way of visualising and browsing databased information," said Rhizome Founder and Creative Director Mark Tribe. And we thought we were onto something new with our Archive Matrix.

For the techies out their itching to know how it works, StarryNight depends on two pieces of original software: a set of Perl scripts that sort texts by keyword and record their individual hits, and a Java applet that filters this information to draw stars and constellations. "The StarryNight browser is the beginning of a new, community- oriented software initiative at Rhizome," says Rhizome Technical Director Alex Galloway. So, if you fancy a night out under the stars and it is still pissing with rain, then you know where to go.

http://www.rhizome.org/starrynight/

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