Archival analysis art

These geometric images may look like modern art, but in reality they are schematics used to visualize archives.

According to their press release:

TACC created a visualization based on “treemap” and relational database systems to represent the collection’s arrangement and to show its properties at different levels of aggregation, classification and abstraction. Treemaps use nested rectangles to display hierarchically-structured data, and use sizes and colors to show properties such as type of file formats, file sizes, file numbers and preservation risk. Specifically, the TACC treemap presents a view of a 3-million-file NARA test collection that allows one to identify the differences between groups of records through visual clues, and distinguish patterns and outliers that would be difficult to spot otherwise. Moreover, it allows archivists to learn by visually comparing and contrasting groups of records.

To read more about TACC's work to make NARA's data more accessible, check out their press release.