The Art Bin Top 20 Files
That the readers have highs standards is of course not surpirising, but still it is remarkable that classics like Francis Bacon's "The New Atlantis" and Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" together with world literature's first known manual, Chaucer's "A Treatise on the Astrolabe" found their way into this list. Articles about comics and rock groups did not. On the other hand, Betty Page beat them all ...
I have done some interpolation to compensate for how long time articles have been available, but of course this is not an exact science. As a matter of fact web statistics is such an uncertain trade that I will not publish any figures here, just the relations between file accesses.
The list is calculated from figures from the last year plus two months (May '96-July '97). Should I have covered the time from the very first issue of The Art Bin two years ago, the Kisamor files would probably have made it to the list. They were very popular the first year.
Surprising is also that, for some reason, The Art Bin readers have some special predilection for Rilke, and not Rilke in general but the fifth Duino elegy, which ended up number 19. And among my own Photoshop experiments "Return of Pleurisy" got four times as many visitors as the rest of those images and should really be on place 15 here below, but I suspect the result is due to medical students looking for something else then barely visible pictures ... (After interpolating with the number of readers who viewed the other images I decided the pleurisy image would end up appr. number 25 or 30, that is, outside this list.)
The text material seems to be the most popular (if number 1 is to be regarded as primarily a text or image document could of course be disputed). Otherwise the visual artists who found their way into this list are Ted Warnell, Channa Bankier, Edvard Derkert and Teresa Wennberg.
Here is the list - with links:
1. The Betty Page Revival (ENG); Det våras för Betty Page (SWE)
2. Eudora - How a Southern writer came to lend her name to a computer program (the actual story, "Why I Live at the P.O." by Eudora Welty, got almost as many visitors as this article)
3. The hacker - archaeologist of the future? (The second of a series of three articles about archival preservation of electronic documents).
4. The Ruskin texts about William Turner's paitings.
5. 3 D images, to be viewed with or without anaglyph specs.
6. Good morning, my name is Guillaume Apollinaire! (ENG); God dag, mitt namn är Guillaume Apollinaire! (SWE). An article by Björn Ericsson introducing "L'Esprit Nouveau et les Poëtes."
7. Sound file: James Joyce reads from "Finnegans Wake".
8. About the origins of the @-sign: "A sign of the times" (ENG), "Ett tecken i tiden" (SWE)
9. "Jens August Schade: Den kosmiske barden". Essay about Danish poet Schade. Only available in Swedish.
10. Jonathan Swift: A Modest Proposal (1729).
11. Adam Smith: Wealth of Nations (1776).
12. Ted Warnell: Six photographics, 1995-96.
13. Francis Bacon: The New Atlantis (1614).
14. Geoffrey Chaucer: A Treatise on the Astrolabe (appr. 1391).
15 Linda Hedendahl: Elva dikter (SWE), eleven poems in Swedish.
16. Georg Stiernhielm: Hercules. (Verbatim from the 1658 printed edition in old Swedish, written by "the father of Swedish literature".)
17. Channa Bankier: Five images (computer art), 1996.
18 Edvard Derkert: Seven collages, 1992-96.
19. Rainer Maria Rilke: Duineser Elegien, the fifth elegy.
20. Teresa Wennberg: Stills from 3D computer animations.
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