Remember when Senator Ted Stevens said the Internet was a “series of tubes?” Well, back in the 90s, people talked a lot about the “information superhighway.” Do a Google image search for that phrase. You’ll see a lot of tubes.

The way we represent technical concepts visually shapes how people understand them, which in turn affects how and why decisions are made. In this project, we investigate security's visual representations. We've collected two years' worth of Google Image Search results, from 28 different search terms.

We're continuing to crunch the seven gigabytes of imagery data we've collected. We'll update this site as we publish our findings.

In the meantime, if you'd like to explore the data yourself, grab the full dataset on Kaggle.

Acknowledgements

These cards are inspired by conversations with John Chuang. Many thanks to the members of BioSENSE for their invaluable feedback in pushing this idea forward.