The Mall

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Like many other kids in the third grade, I really enjoyed drawing things and using simple markers and crayons as an outlet for my active imagination. For some reason, I became obsessed with creating and drawing imaginary storefronts and the various items that each of them sold.

Over the course of about a year, my friends and I drew countless different storefronts - some based in reality, others entirely imagined. I visualized our creation as a giant mall of sorts, with each storefront physically connected to other stores that we had created. I envisioned a giant network of stores, and wanted to find some way to connect all of our drawings and represent their actual spatial relationships. Unfortunately, third-grade me lacked the technical know-how to actually make this happen, and my idea sat unfinished in a small folder tucked away in a my parents' garage.

Fast forward 18 years to me visiting Colorado for Winter Break. I'm digging through boxes of my old stuff - at the request of my parents to finally "get this crap out of here" - and stumble across my old third grade project. Seeing as I had some time to fill, I started Googling some HTML5 and JavaScript network visualizations and cobbled something together.

I tried to connect each image to the correct neighbors, but it turns out that third-grade me was actually pretty awful at creating a sensible organization structure... Any nodes that are unconnected are stores that we forgot to connect to another one. Nodes without images are store names that I found references to, but no actual drawing.

Eat your heart out, younger-me

Click to expand an image. Click anywhere else to return to the entire network. Use the buttons to move around. You can also click and drag, as well as scroll to zoom.