danielknox.net

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.