Data Visualization

Press Picker: an interactive visualisation tool that lets users scroll vertically through British Library newspaper titles, revealing their temporal coverage from the 1700s to the 2000s. Each row represents a newspaper title; red marks indicate available digitised issues. The tool exposes the uneven distribution of the collection across time and geography, helping researchers understand what is - and is not - represented before drawing conclusions from computational analyses at scale. Abstract This chapter describes how the Living with Machines project approached the British Library’s digitised newspaper collection - one of the largest in the world. Through an open-access digitisation programme, the British Library has made hundreds of millions of articles available for computational analysis. Yet working with this collection at scale requires understanding its contours: which titles are included, what time periods they cover, and where the gaps lie. The chapter introduces Press Picker, an interactive visualisation tool for exploring the temporal and geographic distribution of newspaper titles, and presents an Environmental Scan surveying how digitised newspapers have been used in humanities research. Together, these contributions help researchers navigate the collection critically, making visible the biases and silences that shape any large-scale digitised corpus. ...

Comparing seismic tomography models has traditionally required downloading multiple datasets, learning different formats, and writing custom visualization code. SubMachine addresses this by providing web-based tools for interactive exploration of more than 45 global and regional tomography models through a standard browser interface. The platform enables side-by-side model comparison, statistical analysis, and integration with complementary datasets including plate reconstructions, crustal structure, shear wave splitting, and gravity anomalies. By making these Earth models accessible without installation or specialized software, SubMachine facilitates collaborative research across the solid Earth community and supports quantitative comparison of different imaging approaches. Abstract We present SubMachine, a collection of web-based tools for the interactive visualization, analysis, and quantitative comparison of global-scale data sets of the Earth’s interior. SubMachine focuses on making regional and global-scale seismic tomography models easily accessible to the wider solid Earth community, in order to facilitate collaborative exploration. We have written software tools to visualize and explore over 30 tomography models - individually, side-by-side, or through statistical and averaging tools. SubMachine also serves various nontomographic data sets that are pertinent to the interpretation of mantle structure and complement the tomographies. These include plate reconstruction models, normal mode observations, global crustal structure, shear wave splitting, as well as geoid, marine gravity, vertical gravity gradients, and global topography in adjustable degrees of spherical harmonic resolution. By providing repository infrastructure, SubMachine encourages and supports community contributions via submission of data sets or feedback on the implemented toolkits. ...