Paper Trail

A collaboration with two other members of my senior year Capstone project, Dave Landry and Geoff House, Paper Trail is a native OS application used to visualize the network of authors technical papers submitted to the annual SIGGRAPH conference. The project was an exercise in scraping unstructured data and developing a schema by which such a dataset could become useful. Starting with a directory of websites, we were able to turn a collection of sources into a useable database that could be queried and visualized.

The end result was a Java application that visualized the geographic network of authors along with their affiliated institutions over a 45 year period. The project was showcased during Terrence Masson's keynote address to the 2010 SIGGRAPH audience in Los Angeles.