GeoCities: Paradise Lost

Data visualizations and article on the rise and fall of GeoCities

  • Web
  • Computational art
  • Data

GeoCities was an early-Internet platform that let users create their own websites. When GeoCities officially shut down, archivists preserved much of the site’s data in huge spreadsheets, some amounting to hundreds of gigabytes of data. No Replica used the programming language R to programmatically parse this data and created an interactive article summarizing our findings. The resulting website features links to vintage MIDI files, lost URLs, and analyses of image usage.

The site’s introduction, gradually revealing a background of randomly selected URLs from archived GeoCities sites. GIFs periodically fly through the screen.

The site’s design uses vintage web-safe colors and fonts.

In Chapter 3, users can listen to live MIDI recordings downloaded from archived GeoCities sites.

Chapter 4 features a breakdown of image dimensions used, revealing key patterns from the design of GeoCities sites.

This breakdown includes a visualization of the quantity of static images vs. animated GIFs on GeoCities sites.

Chapter 5 lets users return to the collage of URLs from the beginning of the site and actually click links, leading to archived pages.

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