Spaced-OoooO-Out ::

Motion charts really hit the scene a few years ago when Hans Rosling presented a series of wonderfully simple and stunning talks at TED. They are worth watching just for the way in which simple but effective social indicators can be visualised and then used to explain complex societal issues. The software used to produce the visualisations is called GapMinder. In essence, it is a scatter plot that can incorporate coloured, proportional, symbols and then animate them through time. Google saw the power of this and subsequently bought the IP and have incorporated in to Google Docs as a motion gadget.

This is one (also below) I produced comparing the number of pupils on roll in Central Bedfordshire schools against their Total Revenue Income. The vacancy rate for the school can be shown using the proportional symbols and the school stage using colour. The time slider along the bottom shows 7 years of data so you can see how each school varies through time.

Setting up motion charts is relatively painless and here is an excellent tutorial (in 4 parts). Note that if you don’t format your data exactly correctly, the plot will appear to continually load…. it’s actually an error. The best thing is to look either my link above or from the tutorial and mimic the data set. The temporal element is added by dumping the next year of data below the previous year. Temporal databases remain a thorny issue and this approach, behind the scenes, will use a pivot table to separate the data and then load it in to the gadget.

Being Google, you can embed this in to web pages as Ive done below.