Article Fingerprints in the Journal of Digital History by University of Luxembourg / C²DH

The fingerprint is a hyperdense visual representation of the structural composition of a jupyter notebook article published in the Journal of Digital History. It functions both as an overview of the article structure as well as a compact preview and navigation tool to access cells within the article directly. Our goal was to find a representation for each article that would be at the same time unique while conveying a dense display of information about the structure and content that users would learn to interpret over time.

Articles in the Journal of Digital History are alternative and complex formats of publication that combine text, images, sound and video but also code and data distributed across two distinct layers, the narrative layer (featuring transmedia storytelling) and shown on the outside of the fingerprint and (2) the hermeneutic layer (exploring code and the methodological implications of using digital tools and data) pointing towards the inside.
Each dot on the circle represents a cell or paragraph with headings marked as circles and the character length of the individual cells represented as a normal to the circle. The solid circles at the end of the normal indicate the number of bibliographic references in the cell. Color is used to indicate the type of content, with purple highlighting code cells and black and teal highlighting textual content on the narrative layer and hermeneutics layer respectively.
An interactive explanation and generator can be found here:
https://journalofdigitalhistory.org/en/fingerprint-explained
Prototyping was done in observablehq.com with the deployment version rendered as .svg file controlled through javascript.