We are very pleased to offer a preview of our TimesMachine redesign. Our subscribers can, for the first time, read complete issues of The New York Times in their original context. For each issue that is available in the new TimesMachine, every article, every letter and every advertisement is included in a legible, linkable and shareable fashion.
Before we completely replace the original TimesMachine, we’re hoping to get some feedback by releasing a prototype of the new experience. We’ve included the following six issues in the prototype:
- May 25, 1885: The Opening of The Brooklyn Bridge
- June 29, 1914: The Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
- Aug. 7, 1945: The Dropping of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima
- Oct. 5, 1957: The Launch of Sputnik
- July 20, 1969: The Day Before The Moon Landing
- July 7, 1971: The Supreme Court Ruling that permitted The Times to continue its publication of The Pentagon Papers
This is a work-in-progress, and we want to know what you think. If you notice bugs, feel like the software is missing a feature or think that something could be improved, please leave a comment below or send us a note at timesmachine@nytimes.com. Please note, the latest versions of Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer are supported, but older browsers will have trouble displaying the prototype.
Background and Technical Details
For years, TimesMachine has provided our subscribers with the ability to browse scanned pages from every New York Times newspaper published between 1851 and 1922. TimesMachine also represents one of our earliest forays into cloud computing. Still, TimesMachine was built in 2008 and much has changed in the past five years. Storage is cheaper, cloud computing is more accessible and modern web browsers enable us to build applications of far greater sophistication.
So, earlier this year, a small team of developers and designers set out to reimagine the archive browsing experience on NYTimes.com. Our goal was to remove barriers between the user and the newspaper â€" to create an experience that leverages our vast troves of scanned images and metadata but feels as close to holding a newspaper as the web permits.
In order to build the new TimesMachine, we repurposed technology and techniques from an unlikely quarter: geographic information systems. Every scanned issue of The Times is essentially one very large digital image. For instance, our scan of the June 20, 1969 issue is a 13.2 gigapixel image that weighs in at over 200 megabytes. Since it is impractical to transmit such an image to every interested user, we needed to find a way to send only those parts of the scanned paper that a user was actually interested in viewing. To solve this conundrum we turned to tiling, a solution often used to display online maps. With tiling, a large image is broken down into small tiles that are computed at several different zoom levels. When a user wishes to view the tiled image in a browser, only the tiles required to display the visible portion are downloaded. This approach dramatically reduces bandwidth requirements and has the further advantage of allowing users to zoom and drag the larger image.
As developing systems for the generation and display of tiled images from scratch would have been cost prohibitive, we are quite fortunate that there are a number of excellent open source libraries for just these purposes. For processing and tiling the scanned newspapers we relied on both GDAL and ImageMagick. For the in-browser display of our tiled images we relied on the Leaflet mapping library. In addition to great software, we received much valuable guidance from the great people of both Geo NYC and CartoDB.
So, welcome to the New TimesMachine; we’re looking forward to hearing what you think!
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