Monthly Archive for November, 2009

The feedback on my tree map visualization was very insightful. Colleagues pointed out that, while interesting, the tree map suffered from the same problem as my other attempts to visualize the Newstogram data: namely it doesn’t address the time dimension. While tree maps and other ’static’ visualizations (such as bar charts) can display data over a number of different time periods, they don’t really show how the data is changing over time. In the case of many data sets, including the ‘news interest’ data we are tracking through Newstogram, this is the most interesting aspect of the data.

A possible solution is to use a stacked graph visualization. Stacked graphs have been used to visualize a number of data sets including movie revenues, music listening habits, twitter posts, baby names and how people spend their time. So, armed with Lee Byron’s Streamgraph whitepaper, my latest visualization project is to display Newstogram data in a stacked graph.

The title isn’t a metaphor for information overload or filter failure… the walls of my office are literally covered in print-outs or drawings of histograms, pie charts, bar charts, treemaps, mindmaps and various other types of data display.

As DailyMe gets access to more and more data through the Newstogram platform, I am becoming increasingly focused on data visualization and specifically how to make our data visually appealing, easy to understand and (most importantly) useful for our clients.

One of my tasks for next week is to check out the open-sourced Protovis SVG Visualization Library and learn how to make my own treemaps (inspired by the team at Google Analytics who just released the video below showing how to create treemap visualizations of data extracted through their APIs) – I foresee more print-outs getting pinned to the walls….