Skip to main content
Sanctuary Computer

Nobel's Women Who Changed Science

Discover the stories and connections between history's female Nobel prize laureates
Archival collage of scientific imagery: a molecular model, a black-and-white portrait of two researchers, hand-drawn crystal lattices, and a lab photograph.

Collaborators

  • Listen
  • Channel Studio

We crafted an interactive digital archive celebrating the 19 female Nobel laureates in the sciences. Made in collaboration with designers at Listen and Channel Studio.

Project Overview

  1. Working alongside our design & strategy partners, we architected a cohesive single page app experience for exploring a large dataset.

  2. We worked across teams to establish a connection pattern between related data, so different parts of the site could interconnect and talk around that dataset.

  3. We worked against Microsoft infrastructure to deploy a stable experience that was fast and performant under high load.

Network graph view of female Nobel laureates, with portrait nodes radiating from the center connected by faint lines of related research.

Machine learning to explore a lo-fi dataset

Working with Channel Studio (who designed the experience), the Listen team manually digitized and tagged an enormous collection of physical records from the Nobel archives to be handed off for analysis in Microsoft's trend analysis server farms. Clickable through-lines were drawn through our experience to connect laureates with related fields.

Audio clip preview showing a black-and-white archival photo of Barbara McClintock in a cornfield, with an audio waveform overlaid.

Match a laureate

By answering three key questions, the user was matched with a set of laureates that related to their interests. This served as a jumping off point for the user to start exploring the dataset by following through-lines, clicking keywords, and diving into the explore tab.

Mirror-finish device used in Nobel laureate Donna Strickland’s research, photographed in her lab against a black background.

Rock solid Azure infrastructure

Working with Microsoft’s Azure team, Listen, Channel Studio & Sanctuary Computer interpreted the trend analysis data to tie connected laureates together, and make exploring the data easy. To handle the large traffic that The Nobel Prize site is accustomed to, we deployed the experience on Microsoft Azure’s static hosting, too.

The "Women who changed science" experience was released for International Women's Day in 2019.