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.
posted by desjardins on Jul 31, 2008 - 27 comments