This article presents a prototype for the explorable and scalable visualization of an author’s library and its reading traces. It aims to combine design-oriented approaches to the visualization of cultural collections with philological, archival and library research questions.
The visualization concept developed in the project places a special focus on continuous navigation within an author’s library that can be zoomed and filtered at several granularity levels and that allows the exploration of individual objects as well as their comparison. It focuses on the experience and comprehensibility of the collection as a whole and the reading and usage patterns reflected in it, as well as provides access to individual phenomena.