alt Hacker NewsI remember the story of it being made, and I seem to even remember there was some very generous bounty attached, but I never got the point of it. I mean, honestly, ISBN is a pretty problematic thing on its own, especially today, when self-publishing is common, and especially for a web-library that is collecting scans of everything somewhat notable that ever was out there. But even accepting it as a main entity, because that's what we've got right now, what does this visualization achieve? What does it show? You cannot really find a book using it, I mean, any more specifically than "some random book probably in a given language". I was kinda surprised when this visualization was declared a winner of that particular bounty/contest.
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exactly, that map looks like a mess of random blocks...
big blocks are registration groups (countries) and squares inside are registrants (publishers). like a hierarchy. this visualisation helped me to put pieces together - https://vectree.io/c/isbn
There's a bit of an issue with the linked deployment (in my opinion). In the most zoomed out view you should see the first layer of blocks - very big blocks titled "English language", "French language", "German language". See https://phiresky.github.io/isbn-visualization/ maybe. That makes it a bit easier to read.
The point of the visualization is showing different attributes of books in the space of ISBNs. ISBNs correlate with country, publisher, and release date, that's why using it as a space is useful. You can clearly see the history of when blocks were created, which blocks are rarer than others (present in fewer libraries), and (on the AA hosting) which blocks are more present in AA vs not.
In any case though, yes ISBNs as spatial data are clearly not perfect. Do you have any suggestions that would order the 100 million data points better?