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Creating an easier way to explore Steven Soderbergh's media diaries

As a Steven Soderbergh ↗ fan, I was totally drawn in when discovering his media diaries ↗—a complete catalog of everything he watched and read since 2009. An influential and highly productive filmmaker, Soderbergh is also a prolific consumer of media, watching far more TV and movies than most, logging over 4,000 titles in the first ten years.

With hundreds of entries each year, the diary is spread across multiple blog posts on Soderbergh's site. While it's easy to see what Soderbergh watched on any given day, it's challenging to identify larger viewing patterns or his potential favorites. As someone fascinated by filmmakers' favorite movies, I began to view the diary as a vast recommendation list waiting to be explored.

Before I could delve into the diary, I needed a complete, accessible copy. To achieve this, I wrote scripts to scrape, clean, and convert all the entries into a usable format, ensuring I could analyze and explore the data on my own terms.

With the data now in a usable format, I began creating sketches and charts to explore the diary from a broader perspective. In the beginning, basic charts effectively revealed patterns and trends, providing a clear sense of diary activity over time. Later, I investigated ways to depict the diary a year at a time and as a whole.

My initial visual explorations were static and dense, offering only basic details. I sought a more browsable format that could also include extra information, such as a movie's year or Soderbergh's occasional "special notes." The bookshelf format proved effective, providing a clear way to present titles while accommodating extra details. The vertical bookstack allowed for list-like browsing, maintaining the most usable aspect of the original diary format.

Combining book stacks with the earlier timeline chart proved effective for both browsing and providing context for a given entry, similar to a "you-are-here" dot on a map.

The final version includes two main areas: browsing a selected year and a most-read/viewed page. Browsing a year of the diary lets you select any title and see its viewing history across all years if it has one. The most-watched/read page highlights the top titles by media type throughout the entire diary.

This tool successfully made the diary much more accessible, allowing me to extract and highlight what Soderbergh watched most. While it serves as a great discovery tool, it could also be a stepping stone to a more engaging analysis of the diary.

Currently, the site is mostly open-ended and lacks deeper insights or narrative. It would be interesting to build on top of the tool to create a narrative walkthrough or guided tour, perhaps exploring what Soderbergh was watching during his various projects over the years, thus tying the diary more directly to his film and TV work.

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