MIT has a new online visualization of call activity during the presidential inauguration. Combining call volume with caller location and destination location, they’ve generated a beautiful visualization of phone traffic.
The data analyzed consists of hourly counts of mobile phone calls served in Washington, D.C. and includes the origin of the phones involved in the calls. The map of Washington, D.C. is overlaid with a 3D color-coded animated surface of square tiles (1 tile represents an area of 150 x 150 meters). Each tile rises and turns red as call activity increases and likewise drops and turns yellow as activity decreases. On the left, a bar chart breaks down the call activity by showing the normalized contributions of calls from the 50 states and 138 foreign countries grouped by continent. The timeline at the bottom illustrates the overall trend of call activity in the city during the week of the Presidential Inauguration.
See videos of the visualization after the break.
Obama | One People via Information Aesthetics.
Meh. From a visualiation point of view, there’s some cheating going on here. It’s clear that their data is fairly low resolution, and they’re adding extra interpolated points to beef up the “pretty” factor. Pretty, it is, but it’s clear that the spatial resolution of the data does not go all the way down to the little squares like it suggests.