This amazing, interactive visualization was put together by the folks at the NY Times. It diagrams communication patterns of Presidential debate participants through mid-December 2007. In a nutshell, a line is drawn from one candidate to another each time the first candidate mentions the name of the other during the debate. To fully appreciate it, checkout the original and play for a bit. There’s a tremendous amount of information in one graphic including:

• Number of debates a candidate participated in (represented by slice)
• Political affiliation (represented by color
• Number of references a candidate made to other candidates (number of outgoing arrows)
• Number of references made to a particular candidate from other candidates (incoming arrows)
• Timing of such references within a particular debate (location of out going arrow)
• Timing of references over time (slices are organized by sequence of debates)

The technique is relatively simple but yet powerful. Though it may look like the output of my childhood spirograph, it is more like an inter-relationship digraph and generates interesting observations such as:

• Democrats apparently talk about each other much more than the republicans
• Democrat candidates that dropped earlier tended to be referenced fewer times (no surprise)
• Every candidate mentioned Clinton at least once

What do you see?

Thanks to A Beautiful WWW for bringing this to my attention!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 5:25 pm and is filed under Business Intelligence, Visualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.