The goal of this project was to allow people to explore the chronological impact of news and real world events on popular culture. Specifically, we were looking at how news related to astronomy and space travel impacted portrayals of our solar system in fiction. This included the overall volume of science fiction writing, changing depictions of planets over time (as more details of their geography are discovered), and trends in which planets are popular or unpopular settings for novels.
Our dataset consisted of 459 science fiction novels published over the past 363 years (though the majority were published in the 20th century). For the purposes of this project, we stuck to full length novels and novellas, not short stories, and mostly to books originally published in English. We also confined ourselves to novels taking place within the solar system, but not solely on Earth or fictional planets. The data for our project came primarily from the book review site Goodreads, with some additional data on historical events from NASA.
Date: Fall 2017
Client: CS7450 Information Visualization
Skills: HTML, CSS, JavaScript