Visualizing the Collections
Rebecca Sutton Koeser · 2020
I started with a simple idea: visualize the Princeton Prosody Archive (PPA) collections to show their relative size and overlap. I thought this would be a valuable contribution that would help people get a sense of the materials. As we were still developing the project, I did some early experimentation to create a draft diagram based on preliminary numbers, when there were fewer collections. When I returned to the task after the project team had finalized that phase of the collection curation work — now including seven collections instead of six, due to the addition of Music — I discovered that generating accurate Venn diagrams of more than three items is difficult (if not impossible) to do. Very few tools that can generate Venn diagrams will handle more than four or five sets, and accurately reflecting the relationships among that many sets may well be geometrically impossible. Thus began my quest to learn more about visualizing overlapping sets in order to meaningfully display the collections within the PPA. Edited by Mary Naydan and Meredith Martin. This work was supported by the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University.