Hello, this is Tabbit's exploration channel. Each week, we share interesting sites that caught our eye while using Tabbit Browser. The three sites today are creative designs that turn data into visual art.
01 Chronological Map of Tang and Song Literature https://cnkgraph.com/Map/PoetLife
If you think Tang and Song poetry is only about memorizing dates and works, this site may completely change your mind. It lays out the lives of 334 writers from the Tang and Song dynasties on a map you can drag and zoom. Click Aksu and you can see the lines Cen Shen wrote there; search for a familiar name and Su Shi's path of repeated exile unfolds before your eyes. Watching his life move across the dense map, you cannot help feeling that a human life should be lived so fully.
02 Infinite Digest: Sketchbook https://samizdat.co/digest/
Some books are far from enough after one reading, such as David Foster Wallace's enormous maze of a novel, Infinite Jest, with its jumping timeline and tangled relationships. Designer Christian Swinehart's site goes even further: he collected and organized a huge amount of data, then rearranged the entire book through interactive charts. You can see how different characters' storylines intertwine inside the shuffled chronology, and feel visually how an endnote snaps your attention from the main text to hundreds of pages later. Honestly, even if you have not read the original, simply interacting with these smooth charts gives a strange satisfaction. Calm code and chaotic narrative mix together, creating a kind of ordered beauty.
03 In Pieces - 30 Endangered Species, 30 Pieces. http://www.species-in-pieces.com/#
This is an interactive endangered-species project built in pure CSS by Amsterdam designer Bryan James. The site uses no image assets; it relies only on the clip-path property to abstract 30 endangered animals into animated figures assembled from triangular pieces. As you click, the pieces slowly slide and recombine, turning from a vaquita into a kakapo and then into the next species, with each animal page accompanied by precise species information and population curves. There are no bloody images and no sentimental copy. It uses only the poetry of code and the beauty of graphics to remind us that these unique forms of life are, like the visuals themselves, fragile and close to breaking apart.
That's it for today's exploration. Leave a comment and tell us: which of these three sites made you want to try it most?
If you also want to easily collect, organize, and revisit discoveries like these, visit www.tabbit.com to download Tabbit Browser for free. Try its tab groups and bookmarks to keep every internet treasure you find.