George Legrady — library data-visualization

2006

Artists: George Legrady · Year: 2006 · Medium: Data-visualization installation — large-scale public visualizations of library-circulation and demographic data · Substrate: Custom software; library and civic data feeds; large-scale projection installations in libraries and public venues · Place: Santa Barbara, California, USA · Institution: UC Santa Barbara (faculty); independent George Legrady's Making Visible the Invisible (2005) — Legrady sometimes refers to the broader data-visualization commission as Data Flow — was a commissioned public-art installation for the Seattle Central Library at its 2004 opening, realized in 2005. Legrady worked with programmer Rama Hoetzlein to build a six-screen wall-mounted real-time visualization of the library's lending data: every circulation check-out, re-shelving, and patron-hold event in real time, as Seattle's public-library users interacted with the collection through the library's integrated management system. The piece runs continuously. At peak-hours it shows the pulse of the library system — book titles rising and falling, moving across the screens, their positions reflecting the tag categories of the Dewey classification they carry. Six different visualization modes run on cycle: histograms of subject-activity, animated book-cover mosaics, typographic choreographies of recently-returned titles, keyword-cluster maps, flow graphs between branches. The library's patrons see the visualization on the six-screen wall while they browse; the specific book they are about to check out may appear on screen in the minutes before or after they borrow it. Legrady is in this archive because Making Visible the Invisible is the clearest case of data-visualization-as-architecture in the mid-2000s: a public artwork that is, operationally, a real-time dashboard on the institution's internal operations. The work runs inside the Seattle Public Library's IT infrastructure as a permanent installation; it is maintained by Legrady's team through periodic updates to match the library's evolving catalog system, and it remains — twenty years after its installation — one of the longest-running continuously-operating data-visualization artworks in the United States. Legrady had been a photography-based artist before shifting toward computational media in the 1990s. His earlier Pockets Full of Memories (2001, at the Centre Pompidou) had prefigured Making Visible the Invisible's argument: that museum-visitors could contribute data that the museum itself would then present back as an emergent portrait of its own audience. The Seattle piece extends the argument from the museum to the infrastructure. Legrady is a professor at UC Santa Barbara where he runs the Experimental Visualization Lab, still active. Lore Making Visible the Invisible was commissioned by the Seattle Public Library in 2000 — four years before the Rem Koolhaas–designed building opened in 2004 — and Legrady spent those four years, in parallel with the library's construction, building the software and negotiating data-access protocols with the library's IT department. The commission fee was roughly $300,000; the technical implementation consumed most of it. The real-time data feed required direct integration with the library's Sirsi/Dynix integrated library system, which had to be configured to permit live read-only access to circulation events — a configuration that was unusual enough in 2004 that Legrady's team worked with Sirsi/Dynix engineers to develop the connection. The piece has been updated by Legrady three times (2010, 2015, 2020) to maintain compatibility with the library's migrating catalog infrastructure. Each update has been, in Legrady's telling, a meaningful preservation effort — the work lives because Legrady's studio keeps maintaining it. Sources • Legrady, George — Making Visible the Invisible (Seattle Central Library, 2005; monograph/documentation). • Seattle Public Library — Central Library installation file. • Legrady, George — georgelegrady.com (artist archive).