Vintage Magazine Crack

Jim Bumgardner, Flickr master and blogger at Krazydad, has made an avocation out of creating what he calls "coverpops." They’re collages of hundreds, even thousands, of book and DVD covers that form beautiful patterns — and each individual title pops up when you mouse over it. His masterpiece is undoubtedly the coverpop of thousands of […]
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Coverpop_1

Jim Bumgardner, Flickr master and blogger at Krazydad, has made an avocation out of creating what he calls "coverpops." They're collages of hundreds, even thousands, of book and DVD covers that form beautiful patterns – and each individual title pops up when you mouse over it. His masterpiece is undoubtedly the coverpop of thousands of science fiction and fantasy magazine covers from the late 1920s through the present. The magazines create a rich, rainbow-hued collage, and the covers themselves make almost universally fun gawking. Space aliens, babes in distress, and big phallic missiles!

Jim writes:

The 3,448 covers were arranged horizontally by time, with earlier covers to the left, and more recent covers to the right. The covers were arranged vertically by hue . . . Data for each coverpop is prepared using Perl and the ImageMagick library. Space-fillingis implemented (with visual feedback) using Processing (p5). The interface itself is presented in Flash/Actionscript within a PHP webpage. I download information about all the covers using various means. I use Amazon Web Services for theAmazon-powered coverpops, and I screen-scrape websites, such as the Visco archivefor the Science Fiction coverpop. This is done using a Perl program.
Then I download all the thumbnails (again with Perl), and analyse them forcolor, using ImageMagick to reduce each image to 1x1 andrecording the color of the remaining pixel.

Playing with this coverpop is like crack for anyone who is intrigued by vintage magazines or science fiction history. You can even drill down to the Visco archive for more information about each title. This is truly a digital archivist's dream: data displayed in a way that is both aesthetically pleasing and informative.

A Few Thousand Science Fiction Magazines [Krazydad]