UC San Diego student Cyrus Kiani animates 5,930 front pages from The Hawaiian Star, from 1893 to 1912. Pretty much everything on the page gets bigger — the columns, headers, and pictures — while the physical size of the page stays the same. Too bad it only goes up to 1912. It would’ve been fun to see the birth of the giant front page photo.
(I thought I saw something like this done for The New York Times front page or online homepage, but I can’t find it.)
Yes, there was done for the New York Times online homepage but it was a little less than a year – from September 2010 through July 2011. But it spans some important events – Osama bin Laden’s death, the rescue of the Chilean miners, Gabrielle Gifford’s shooting, Fukishima and others. Here’s the article and video at the Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/07/video-a-year-of-news-in-12-000-snapshots-of-the-new-york-times-home-page/242356/.
Yep, that’s the one I was thinking of. Thanks.
Here’s are several visualizations of 4535 Time magazine covers, 1923-2009. It’s not an animation, but you can see some other interesting trends with designs, color saturation, etc.
This process was done at computers at my workplace, and is further described at http://www.nersc.gov/news-publications/news/science-news/2010/a-computational-science-approach-for-analyzing-culture
This was done by Jeremy Douglass and Lev Manovich of UCSD, who have some other interesting works which blend computers, visual arts and cultural analysis.
http://jeremydouglass.com/
http://manovich.net/
I would of loved to continue this but the Chronicling America page from the Library of Congress only has up to 1912. This paper has merged with others in Hawaii and is now the Honolulu Star Advertiser. The advertiser archives dont go to far back.
I am currently working on making one for the San Francisco Call, which was a lot more image orientated in their front pages.