First Visual Drafts

The analytic process delivered some initial insights into the data, and gave my collaborators enough opportunities—maybe more than they desired—to correct, clean, and complete the databases. On that basis, borrowing terminology from Tom Armitage's BERG blog post "Toiling in the data-mines: What data exploration feels like,"^[50] I had a good sense of what was available, significant, and interesting, and of the scale of the data. The next step was to work on the visualization principles.

To quickly prototype some different visual options, I switched to Flash ActionScript 3 using the flare library,^[51] an advanced general-purpose framework for producing interactive visualizations, and I explored more of the stacked charting options using the Excel charts I started with. One insight I gleaned from these charts was that we should try harder to emphasize the individual data points (e.g., the individual years on the vertical axis in Figure 13-7), rather than producing continuous stacked area charts. In the Ars Electronica case, submissions are made on an annual basis only, so a visual interpolation between years would have been misleading and a distortion of reality. These considerations led to the development of more fragile charts, with the interpolation areas toned down to support the notion of them being only connectors between more "solid" yearly events.