Ink is an interactive visual tool for exploring correspondence data developed within the Athanasius project. It provides three different views on the data:

• a map showing the path of each letter (source/destination)
• a time-based stacked bar for comparing the composition of correspondent groups over time
• an alluvial diagram highlighting the relations between three (or more) dimensions of the data related to correspondents

The three visualizations are interrelated: by choosing a specific dimension or value in the alluvial diagram it will be possible to see its distribution over time, in the stacked bar.

###Data model

Three main data collections (as JSON files into /data folder) are used:

light.json
Contains the collection of letters in a lightweight format:

[
	{
		a : "authorId",
		d : "destinationId",
		s : "sourceId",
		r : "recipientId",
		t : "year",
		id : "letterId"
	}, 
	...
]

people.json
Contains the collection of persons in a single JSON object (keys are persons'id)

{
	"personId":
		{
			"Name": "...",
			"Gender": "…",
			"Milieu1": "…",
			"Milieu2": "…",
			"Milieu3": "…",
			"Nationality": "...",
			"Id": "personId"
		},
		...
}

places.json
Similar to places.json, contains the collection of places in a single JSON object (keys are persons'id)

{
	"placeId":
		{
			"City": "",
			"PlaceName": "",
			"Country": "",
			"Region": "",
			"FullName": "",
			"_id": "",
			"InLocationDB": ""
		},
		...
}

###Technology

From a technological point of view, Ink is a web applications using PHP and Python for processing and serving the data and JavaScript (d3 and jQuery libraries) for the visualizations and the UI.