Valentine’s Day is here and with it a visualization with a perspective from the unfortunate break up.

Developed in time for Valentine’s Day 2006, The Dumpster project is an interactive visualization of romantic behavior on a grand scale.

Using real postings extracted from millions of online blogs, visitors to the project can surf through tens of thousands of specific romantic relationships in which one person has “dumped” another.

Dumpster visualizes a fixed collection of 20,000 romantic breakups that occurred during 2005.

The Dumpster Interface:

The main portion of the Dumpster interface is devoted to the Breakup Bubbles. A constantly-changing subset of about 200 breakups is represented by bubbles here. One of the bubbles is very special: the Currently Selected Breakup, which is yellow.

The Current Selected Breakup is important because it acts as a query into the complete database of 20,000 breakups. All of the other bubbles are colored to indicate their similarity to the Current Selection.

At the left side of the Dumpster is the PixelView region. This area represents the entire database of 20,000 breakups, using one pixel per breakup.

A stack of Breakup Balloons at the right of the Dumpster contain the text excerpts associated with each breakup. The Currently Selected Breakup is always shown in the top balloon; the other balloons show the history of your viewing.

At the bottom of the Dumpster is a Timeline showing how many of the breakups in the database happened each day

Artistic Goals of The Dumpster Development Team:

• Maximally Efficient Voyeurism
• Reassuring the broken-hearted
• Philosophical
• Anti-Romantic
• Empathetic Immersion
• Political
• Cultural

For a further explanation of the artists’ goals and how they feel they reached them, visit The Dumpster.

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