Friday September 15, 2006

Visualizing change over time

Recently I stumbled on some really great examples of software that visualize change over time.

First, I would like to draw your attention to this highly entertaining presentation by Hans Rosling as he demonstrates the use of his Gapminder software to bring decades of world health data to life.  This is a full presentation so you may want to advance two minutes into it to get to the good part.  What you will see are scatterplot charts that animate by using time as a third dimension.

Second, here is a very clever tool for seeing of how a community created tagcloud changes over time.  Move the slider to the left to see how the tagcloud looked at different periods in the last year.  I find this interface particularly effective because of the bottom-up nature of tagging.  The tag distribution matures over time as certain tags become more popular within the community.

I would image that a similar approach could be being used to visualize shifting focus in scholarly research over time.  For example within a given research area specialized topics become more or less represented in the scholarly literature over time.  Anyone know of an application that does anything like this?