So, motivated by recent prettiness (C26000’s Last.fm Extra Stats ‘Wave Graph‘ and its inspiration Lee Byron’s Layered Histogram, which also reminds me of the fundamentally different but visually close-enough IBM Research/Viégas/Wattenberg’s history flow), I have put in some preliminary aggregation logic and a ‘stacked linechart’ visualization. It’s quite the poor cousin to Lee Byron’s stuff, but we’ve got to start somewhere.

Although histogram is probably a better term for the result, the visualization is actually ignorant that there’s aggregation going on, so stacked linechart it is. The data is the same data (wordpress shoutbox ‘shouts’) from my last post, but instead of block stacking to get a de facto histogram, the binned time-intervals are aggregated by author. The stacked linechart consumes these and — presto — a de facto trendy histogram. The main difference here is that the bin period is 7 days, although bugs remain. I am going to replace my haphazard date logic with python-dateutil shortly to resolve this problem.

Of course, the whole point of visophyte is (excessive) flexibility, so let’s at least leverage that. The above is the same data, but with the fill’s saturation varying with the total number of hyperlinks included in ‘shouts’ for that time interval, producing a quasi-retro wire-frame effect.  Stronger/bolder colors = more links, lighter/faded colors = less/no links.  Some day, perhaps a pretty spline version, but up next is getting back to Thunderbird.

A visualization of the shoutbox traffic on www.frinkiac.org since the dawn of time or the blog, whichever came later. Colors are defined by the ‘shouting’ user (hue), the linearly scaled log of the word count of the contents (saturation), and a constant for value to get darker lines. So ‘brighter’ colors = longer shouts and ‘lighter’ colors = shorter shouts. All colors are regrettably ugly. The dawn of time is on the left, modern times is on the right. I think the clustering routine has decided each column is three days, although that may get a little shaky at the end of the months (quick-n-dirty date logic.)

This should look similar to…

ye olde KoalaRainbow 0.* for MovableType. The MTKR one is actually blog posts and comments and doesn’t distinguish based on the author, but the point is that I am beginning to be able to do all the things I used to be able to do. This helps flesh out the set of base visualizations and ensure that the architecture doesn’t have any obvious holes in things. Although the visophyte vis definition is perhaps still more verbose than I would like, it doesn’t make me lose hope like the procedural MTKR one did (click on the latter picture and scroll down to witness the ugliness).