Here at Mendeley we have a hack day every month where our developers (and even the non-techy folk) try to come up with cool and/or useful projects. On one of those days, Carles Pina from our Desktop team thought it would be interesting to play around with the Google Maps API to visualize Mendeley activity around the globe. He took Mendeley Desktop sync apache logs, mapped the IP addresses to each geolocation using python-geoip, and then fed this into the Google Maps API to generate each keyframe.

As you play through the video – which covers about 2.5 days of Mendeley activity – each glowing dot represents a sync event, which then gently fades out over a few frames. The darker shade that moves across the screen shows the time between sunset and sunrise, and you might notice that the activity decreases at night, but that in places like the US East Coast – perhaps unsurprisingly – there are plenty of people burning the midnight oil. It seems that researchers in New York don’t really believe in sleep. Steve Dennis worked on making this beautiful video, with relaxing music provided by The Disconnect , and we wanted to share it with you. It is, after all, a video starring our users and showing how Mendeley is being used by researchers around the world, and around the clock.

We hope you like it, let us know what you think and if you have any suggestions!