Martyn Dade Robertson

A lecturer from Newcastle University has developed a method for mapping websites and turning their hidden data into intricate artworks. The visualisations capture websites frozen at a specific point in time and show navigational links that a user can see, along with buried links to code, images, videos and external links.

Over the past ten years Martin Dade Robertson has been building a software application called Data Cartographer, which chews up data from a specific website and creates an image from it. The data is gathered using a web crawler -- similar to those used by search engines -- to track and map all links within a URL.

The artworks are plotted out using a "force directed graph". They contain nodes representing all the site's components, and all the lines that stretch between them represent the hyperlinks. The software allows users to edit their images in post-production in order to adjust the colours and line weights.

Martyn Dade Robertson

Dade Robertson is a lecturer in architecture, and uses the proceeds of his artworks, which are often commissioned by large companies to fund further research into the links between architectural design, online spaces and information visualisation. He also hopes the money might help to support a student scholarship.

"I've been interested in the ideas behind the data portraits for some years now, looking at the way the online world is developing and how you could show that dense information in a new way in my research," says Dade Robertson.

"I started playing around with the data and found a way to capture the information and make it into art. What is really fascinating about this is that it really is a snapshot of a website at particular point in time and if I did the same process again just a day later, the data portrait would be different as the information available would have changed."


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