We made a radical decision with the 9/11 Memorial Museum team and our colleague exhibition designers to craft an experience that transcends a singular narrative. Instead, it weaves personal history, as told by a wide sampling of those who experienced it, with a timeline of events. Together with this rich team of collaborators, we created a museum for everyone, using algorithms and visualization techniques to make the story of each exhibition clear and engaging for all.

The 9/11 Memorial Museum continues to be well attended, with more than 2.5 million people from all 50 states and 150 nations visiting in the eleven months since opening day on May 21, 2014. To date, more than 200,000 of those visitors have felt compelled to leave behind their own stories at one of the interactive exhibitions. This includes the 5,000 who recorded their thoughts and memories in the Reflecting on 9/11 recording booth, and the 13,000 visitors who have shown their commitment to the museum through memberships.

“The museum has done something powerful... It’s emotionally overwhelming, particularly, I expect, for New Yorkers who were in the city on that apocalyptic September day and the paranoia-fraught weeks that followed, but almost as certainly for the estimated two billion people around the globe who followed the horror unfolding on television, radio and the Internet.”

– Holland Cotter, May 14, 2014, The New York Times

The creative use of data didn’t just enhance the 9/11 Memorial Museum: it’s the central nervous system of the museum. Each exhibition houses layered stories that visitors can explore at their own pace, in their own way.

The memorial exhibition, In Memoriam, includes a wall of faces of the almost 3,000 victims who perished on 9/11. The photos by themselves make for a powerful visual. But thanks to the exhibition’s vast archive of metadata, visitors can dive even deeper into the lives of each victim, and understand how victims’ lives intersected, whether they were firefighters, office workers, brothers, husbands or wives. In We Remember, a visualization of audio and text accounts of 9/11 are transposed onto a map of the world, using data collected on where each speaker was on the day of the attacks.

One of the most significant data-driven exhibitions is Timescape, which visualizes millions of articles written in and about the post-9/11 era. Using an algorithm based on research from Columbia University, and designed specifically for the installation, we found the similarity among articles by measuring how often key words appear. The resulting piece shows how the relationships of certain words, topics, and articles reveal deeper truths and shifting trends in the post-9/11 world, such as the long-term negative impact of 9/11 on the airline industry, which lost roughly 55 billion dollars and shed 160,000 jobs in the decade that followed.