I’ve highlighted Jonathan Harris’ technologically mind-blowing storytelling projects and platforms in this space before. Just learned of one I hadn’t checked out before, Universe. Here, you type in a word or phrase and see it depicted using the “metaphor of an interactive night sky.”

Your word or phrase is depicted in terms of nine “Stages,” titled: Stars, Shapes, Secrets, Stories, Statements, Snapshots, Superstars, Settings, and Time. In Harris’ words: “Stars presents a cryptic star field; Shapes causes constellation outlines to emerge; Secrets extracts the most salient single words and presents them to scale; Stories extracts the sagas and events; Statements extracts the things people said; Snapshots extracts images; Superstars extracts the people, places, companies, teams, and organizations; Time shows how the universe has evolved over hours, days, months, and years.”

In the illustration shown below right, I used the term “American Idol.” This piece is from the “Shapes stage,” though the shapes are pretty difficult to see here.

Harris explains the concept behind the project in his artist’s statement:

If we were to make new constellations today, what would they be? If we were to paint new pictures in the sky, what would they depict? … Universe is a system that supports the exploration of personal mythology, allowing each of us to find our own constellations, based on our own interests and curiosities. Everyone’s path through Universe is different, just as everyone’s path through life is different. Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world’s contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from Daylife [the Daylife Platform, an, “intelligent content services platform” that “collects content from thousands of high-quality online sources, deeply analyzes and parses it, and creates a trove of data.”]

Whereas news is often presented as a series of unrelated static events, Universe strives to show the broader narrative that contains those events. The only way to begin to see the mythic nature of today’s world is to surface its connections, patterns, and themes. When this happens, we begin to see common threads — myths, really — twisting through the stream of information.