Computers, Archives and Librarians in Star Trek

This weaving accompanies the article "The Librarian, the Computer, the Android and Big Data", co-authored with Nichole Nomura for Vectors. It is a textile representation of some of the data created from running some simple word-search computational analysis code on a corpus of Star Trek novels, looking for the words "the computer", "librarian" and "the archive".

The warp has a different color for each Star Trek series/show, proportional to the number of books published from that series. Originally I imagined weaving all the data, but I ran out of warp after TOS (the light blue weft yarns). Every book is marked by one pick of weaving in the color of the series (all TOS, or light blue). What follows is a black yarn if a computer was mentioned, a black and white yarn if the archive was mentioned, and a bulky blue yarn if the word "librarian" appears in the book. All but one book mention the computer, and references to the other terms are much rarer. Yet, you can see their impact on the weaving because the lattice pattern (like the information landscape discourse in the books) shifts whenever one appears.