GeoCities: Paradise Lost
Data Narrative

Searching for meaning in data from an Internet that no longer exists

Overview

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 massive datasets, some containing hundreds of gigabytes of data across billions of rows.

No Replica used the programming language R to 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 how images were used in a bygone era.

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Services
Digital experience design
Website design
Website development
Data analysis
Data visualization
Editorial writing
Year
2023
The site’s introduction gradually reveals a background of randomly selected URLs from archived GeoCities sites. As the user reads the article, vintage GIFs periodically fly across the screen.
The site’s design uses web-safe colors and fonts that reflect a modern interpretation of design aesthetics from the 1990s.
In Chapter 3 of the article, users can listen to live MIDI recordings downloaded from archived GeoCities sites.
Chapter 4 features a breakdown of standard image dimensions, revealing key patterns from the design of GeoCities sites.
This breakdown includes a visualization of the quantity of static images versus animated GIFs on GeoCities sites.
Chapter 5 lets users return to the collage of URLs from the beginning of the site and click links leading to archived GeoCities pages.

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