Nobel — Women Who Changed Science

Discover the stories and connections between women who changed science

Tech stack:

  • React
  • Redux
  • Contentful
  • WebGL

Sanctuary Computer 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. 1.

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

  2. 2.

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

  3. 3.

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

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.

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.

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. In addition, and to handle to 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.