Time Capsule • 1999
| An eight-page year-in-review that reads like a magazine and behaves like a Power BI report — assembled from public archives, set in a fixed design system, and told one chapter at a time. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
What it isEight report pages covering one year: Cover, Headlines, Soundtrack, Screen, Tech, Numbers, Rewind, and Where You Were. Each chapter carries one chart and the editorial copy that explains it, styled after print year-in-review issues rather than a dashboard. The data comes from Wikipedia, Billboard's year-end Hot 100, Box Office Mojo, the OMDb API, eight Federal Reserve series, and a Spotify audio-features dataset. Python scripts handle acquisition and cleaning; Power BI handles the model, visuals, and layout. The judgment — which events matter, which songs stand in for a hundred, which chart shape makes the point — is documented rather than implied. By the numbers
The pages
Cover. Four numerals at 640pt and a chapter list. The masthead uses mid-dot separators because letter-spacing alone closed the word gaps and rendered "ATIMECAPSULE".
Headlines. A calendar heatmap where color carries editorial significance and the bars alongside carry raw count — so a busy month and a consequential one never collapse into the same mark. 217 events, merged from the 1999 year article and 366 day-of-year pages.
Soundtrack. Billboard's year-end Hot 100 fuzzy-joined to Spotify audio features, 100 of 100 matched. Three songs on a six-feature radar — Britney Spears, Jay-Z, Jewel — chosen because their shapes barely overlap. Screen. Fifty films plotted by IMDb rating against domestic gross, with quadrants named rather than numbered: Forgotten, Held up, Overpaid, Underseen. The strip plot places each director's 1999 inside a decade of their work.
Tech. Thirty milestones by category, sized by significance. Napster's June dot is one of the smallest marks on the page; the curve beside it is what the dot turned into.
Numbers. Four Federal Reserve series drawn across a decade — five years either side of 1999 — with the issue year picked out in red. The argument is that the indicators never agreed on direction.
Rewind. The chapter for what doesn't fit a chart — the Furby's 14 million units, Bezos as Person of the Year, an In Memoriam column. No visual, same grid and voice.
Where You Were. A what-if age parameter drives DAX that rewrites the page's copy for the reader's age in 1999 — same evidence, different vantage point. Judgment callsNASDAQ substituted for the S&P 500FRED's
SP500 series only reaches back to 2013, so against a 1990s window it returns an empty chart rather than an error. The NASDAQ Composite is also the sharper instrument for a dot-com issue: up about 86% in 1999, peaking ten weeks later. The substitution is recorded in the project brief so every measure names the NASDAQ rather than implying the S&P.Films the calendar year hidBox Office Mojo buckets by calendar-year gross, dropping Magnolia, The Hurricane and The Cider House Rules — December limited releases that earned in 2000 — out of 1999 entirely. A second OMDb pass restores them; the four that survived dedup carry
Source = "OMDb-supplemental" and Rank = 999 so an editorial addition can't pass as a chart position.Significance over countCounting events makes a crowded news week and a consequential one look identical. Each headline carries a weight from 2 to 5; color encodes weight, bars encode count, and the caption says which is which.
A scraper that had to change shapeWikipedia's twelve month pages for 1999 all soft-redirect to the year article, so the intended scrape returned the same page twelve times. The fix: fetch the year article once for 88 anchor events, walk all 366 day-of-year pages for the other 135, and merge at 0.85 title similarity.
Pipeline
Row counts are the tables as they stand in Built with
Sources
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