Project Link

Print Wikipedia

Print Wikipedia is the entirety of the Wikipedia online encyclopedia compiled into printable books. For this ambitious artwork, interdisciplinary artist Michael Mandiberg wrote software that parses the entirety of the English-language Wikipedia database and programmatically lays out thousands of volumes, complete with covers, and then uploads them for print-on-demand.

Screen Shot 2015-10-15 at 1.39.54 PM

To make the contents of this gargantuan archive accessible, Michael provided me with a list of 7000 titles and links and asked me to turn them into a browsable website. We worked together to clean up the data and automate the generation of SVG thumbnails for each book with tightly controlled, beautiful typography. I then built a simple, infinitely-scrollable website allowing users to smoothly browse thousands of volumes, and navigate to a page where they can purchase a volume of the encyclopedia.

Roles:

  • Frontend Development
  • Full-Stack Development (scripting)

Technologies:

  • Underscore template engine
  • HTML/JS/CSS