Description
The Commons Explorer by Mitchell Whitelaw and Sam Hinton, an experimental interface for the Flickr Commons — a program launched in 2008 where cultural heritage institutions share their photographic collections with no known copyright restrictions. The Explorer provides a "big picture" view of these collections through a rich, single-screen interface that reveals structures and patterns and encourages exploration. Written in Java/Processing, it arranges thousands of photographs in a navigable mosaic organized by date, institution, or visual similarity. Whitelaw, a digital media researcher at the Australian National University, is known for work on cultural data interfaces and generous interfaces for digital collections.