Below is a visualization of the text-based collections - including newspapers, manuscripts, letters and other original sources - dating from 1865 to 1877 in the Library of Congress.

Not sure how to interact with the graph? Try these:

  • Zoom in or out using the scroll on your mouse or trackpad
  • Click and drag to move the visible area
  • Hover over a dot to see information about that item and to access it

You can also watch the intro video to see these tips in action.

What are the dots, and why are they different colors?

Every dot you see is a document, positioned based on their similarity (as determined by the neural net). Two dots close to each other share similar content and ones further away share less. The inital colors by date show older dates as cooler colors and later dates as warm colors. And the highlight drop-down recolors the dots so the warmer color dots are more related to the selected subject than the cooler ones.