O.K., let's visualize

[rhu]

Via H&FJ comes a link to this wonderful data visualization:



Can you guess what the source data represent, before clicking through?

Comments

[xach.livejournal.com]

I can! (But that's cheating.)

[ertchin.livejournal.com]

I needed the hint of hovering over the link/chart, sadly.

I do like the hint of the line that jumped from the bottom to the top in the second column. I bet you get a lot of those right around there in other charts.

[jedusor.livejournal.com]

Wow. That's really cool.

[fauxklore]

It looks cool, but I have to wonder if it would be readable by somebody with red-green color blindness. I used to work for somebody who was color blind, and often had to advice contractors to modify presentations because our director would literally not be able to see the point they were trying to make.

[ken_r]

Fascinating approach. (No, I didn't guess it before clicking through.)

I have to wonder how useful the representation actually is (e.g., entries sometimes swap vertical positions as you move to the right, and occasionally the line for an entry moves up instead of down when moving to the next column, but the vertical range seems to be based around a fixed center, not a fixed top or bottom, so does the absolute vertical position actually tell you anything, or is it only the relative position compared to others in a given column), but it does present some data in a much more obvious way than a few charts of numbers.

[42itous.livejournal.com]

I had trouble figuring out what the data represented *after* clicking through. My guess is it has something to do with television, which would explain why none of these titles means anything to me. Or, no wait, some of these sound like movies. Maybe it's box office money.

[jtidwell.livejournal.com]

Neat!

As is often the case with visualizations like this, the interesting story isn't in the specific data points, but in the patterns you see as you pan over the whole thing. Look, there are the summer blockbusters -- big ol' movies with blockier renderings than the movies earlier in the year. Before them, there's a steady decline in overall sales through late April (then suddenly people started going to movies more, apparently). As for individual films, "The Bucket List" looks like an indie that suddenly got some good word-of-mouth: it starts low, goes high, then has a long tail. "Sex and the City" and "The Love Guru" look like failures, with steep drops after the first week. And I had no idea "Iron Man" earned almost as much as "Indiana Jones"!