In this collaboration with Israeli artist Romy Achituv, I implemented a data visualization of the books in the Garden Library for Refugees and Migrant Workers in South Tel-Aviv. This is an open?air library located in a public park, established to serve the area’s refugee and migrant worker community. The library has no security guard who checks and asks questions, no walls and no door.
The Garden Library has a unique emotion-based system where readers rate the books according to seven emotional categories: amusing, bizarre, boring, depressing, exciting, inspiring, and sentimental. Every time a book is returned to the shelves, the emotional judgment assigned by the last reader is added to the growing emotional history of the book. The visualization tries to represent the wandering of the books across the different emotional categories.