Comments on: Ooh, look at all the pretty data.

Ooh, look at all the pretty data.

desjardins — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:30:34 -0800

Stream graphs, or stacked graphs, are a new form of (sometimes interactive) visualization that present data in a fluid timescale format. For example, the NY Times website has a graph showing the box office receipts from 1996-2008. There's a Twitter streamgraph based on keywords. Here's one of all the musicians a Last.fm user has listened to over time. Track the popularity of baby names back to the 1880s. Possibly the most striking, if not necessarily intuitive, is this visualization of US population by county, 1790-2000. There's already an academic study of the technique.

By: cortex

cortex — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:35:42 -0800

Huh. That's pretty nice. I'd seen the baby name thing before, but the box office example is really pretty striking.

By: Artw

Artw — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:39:37 -0800

Eh? Stacked graphs are new? The box office one seems quite pretty and visually very different from others I've seen though.

By: Mr. Palomar

Mr. Palomar — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:40:43 -0800

Here's another, Tufte-inspired version of box-office visualization I just came across today. It reminded me of having seen the NYT link a few months back. That one is definitely more striking, but this one is cool in a more minimalist, non-Flash kind of way.

By: Artw

Artw — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:41:07 -0800

The census data ones are quite pretty too, though I suspect they are useless for anything.

By: cortex

cortex — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:42:50 -0800

Yeah, I think it's more the fluid look that most of the examples present that feels like a Clever New Thing—with the box office example, it does a really nice job of capturing the "envelope" of the films' revenue in context, with the tails slipping off into the center like that. If there's any good freely-available software for producing something that slick, I might have to have a go at like mefi comment activity over time.

By: turgid dahlia

turgid dahlia — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:43:51 -0800

The first person to make a box office-esque stacked graph for MetaFilter posts wins one (1) internet.

By: chrominance

chrominance — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:45:17 -0800

Related to the last.fm graph: make your own.

By: cortex

cortex — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:48:56 -0800

(I actually made a very rudimentary not-flowy-looking stacked graph of comment activity across subsites a while back, but it doesn't capture anything as interesting as per-thread activity, just subsite distribution as a whole, and it's also hella ugly.)

By: beagle

beagle — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:06:36 -0800

On the box office receipts one, is there significance to whether the film shows above or below the center line? If not, why is there an up and down differentiation -- stacking everything upward would give a better picture of total receipts of all films combined. And, I don't think this is really new, except for the interactive elements made possible by an online version. I recall studying stacked graphs in science and geography books in the 1950s and 60s, and I'm sure they were around before that.

By: UbuRoivas

UbuRoivas — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:07:48 -0800

I read that as steam graphs, and immediately thought "I bet they're just regular graphs with some brass doodads tacked on..."

By: Artw

Artw — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:08:19 -0800

On the box office receipts one, is there significance to whether the film shows above or below the center line? For the pretty, would be my guess. I suspect Tufte would call it noise.

By: hattifattener

hattifattener — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:18:56 -0800

It reminds me immediately of this graph of popular music geneology, which I had a hard time tracking down until I turned up this MetaFilter post which I somehow missed a few days ago.

By: ZachsMind

ZachsMind — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:26:27 -0800

Check out June of 1993 and look at Jurassic Park. Is this a (for lack of a better word) 'typo' on the part of the graph makers, or was Jurassic Park really kept in theaters from June of 1993 until October of 1994? The following year, check out Lion King and Forest Gump. And Toy Story in 1995. I mean, many big movies I can see lasting from summer to Christmas, but over a year? Compare that behavior to more recent years. Pirate of the Carribean 2 for example, in 2006. Thanks to DVD and other variables, over a year of exposure in movie theaters just doesn't happen much anymore.

By: Mr. Palomar

Mr. Palomar — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:31:09 -0800

That genealogy of pop/rock music that hattifattener linked to, while also neat, reminds me immediately of the kids' book Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.

By: michswiss

michswiss — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:36:29 -0800

desjardins, the academic link is interesting for me on two fronts. One is the visualisation technique itself, the other is the association with Martin Wattenberg. Martin is also involved in a collaborative visualisation initiative known as Many Eyes.

By: smackfu

smackfu — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:43:09 -0800

Check out June of 1993 and look at Jurassic Park. Is this a (for lack of a better word) 'typo' on the part of the graph makers, or was Jurassic Park really kept in theaters from June of 1993 until October of 1994? Keep in mind they're using a logarithmic scale. So the answer is "yes, but..." It wasn't making much, only about $200k per weekend, but I guess it was profitable enough for a few hundred theaters to keep it running. I don't think most blockbusters actually peter out properly nowadays. Like your example of POTC2 was pulled from theaters and it was still making $200k. Bug report: Waiting to Exhale is mislabeled as Mr. Holland's Opus (in December 1995).

By: beagle

beagle — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:45:41 -0800

ZachsMind: that was pre DVD, so yes, I can believe the films continued to see some small box office stream that long.

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:54:23 -0800

On the box office receipts one, is there significance to whether the film shows above or below the center line? If not, why is there an up and down differentiation -- stacking everything upward would give a better picture of total receipts of all films combined. My guess is that you get double the horizontal density if you use both sides of the x-axis. If you only used the top half you'd have to at least double the horizontal scale to be able to see everything. Plus, the pretty.

By: Chuckles

Chuckles — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:15:28 -0800

There are a very few movies with long tails, but it does happen. Check out Titanic, or My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

By: UbuRoivas

UbuRoivas — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:33:06 -0800

Jurassic Park had long tails.

By: ZenMasterThis

ZenMasterThis — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:40:41 -0800

From Byron & co's white paper: "...arranging the layers in a distinctively organic form." They also reference Tufte's "macro/micro" principle.

By: xorry

xorry — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:14:32 -0800

Tufte would be rolling in his closet. Mr. Palomar points to a better solution. At first glance it looks like this National Treasure thing triumphed over I am legend. It has a knee on the damn thing yelling 'yaaarhaangaa I tha winnah'. To actually get any information out of the graph besides the relative total box office receipts for a time period requires clicking around and a ruler. The NWT graph like an awesome bowel movement - sure it's pretty, but it's mostly poop.

By: infinitewindow

infinitewindow — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:06:19 -0800

Now I can better visualize what long tail really means.

By: desjardins

desjardins — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 08:13:09 -0800

I make these posts to bring out all the data geeks.

By: bonehead

bonehead — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 08:22:47 -0800

The NWT graph like an awesome bowel movement - sure it's pretty, but it's mostly poop. I wouldn't put it quite so colourfully, but I agree. The human eye is good at comparing distances, but really terrible at comparing areas. A long and skinny object looks bigger than a more compact, but larger object. A related problem is the fact that a circle of double the area will only appear to be 1.4 times bigger; eyes tend to judge the differences of the diameters, not that of the areas. I've never seen a graph work which depends on area. The human brain just doesn't see things that way.

By: enn

enn — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:00:59 -0800

Those are pretty nice, Palomar, and a great recommendation for their creator's Vecto vector-drawing library, if there are any Common Lisp people lurking here. A while back I did a similar stack graph of news coverage over time that started out looking quite a bit like the NYT one linked here. Eventually, for all of the reasons mentioned above and after actually reading Tufte, I decided it was really more pretty than enlightening, and the final version was much more bland (in part, too, because of performance problems with lots of SVG curves). But the Vecto graphs do a great job of being pretty without being misleading.

By: rtha

rtha — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 18:08:09 -0800

Metafilter streams.