Saturday, September 27, 2008

Spreadsheet visualization of industry-sector political contributions

The Sunlight Foundation posted a great video showing how money has flowed into the Republican and Democratic parties from different industry sectors over time. In normal circumstances, I might have said "(yawn) pass the nuts"... but... they used the Motion Chart in Google spreadsheets to visually show the changes in these flows over time. If you love data, whether you're politically interested or not, you gotta love this visualization... I'm embedding it here for convenienve... full credit to Sunlight for this specific video, to Gapminder team and the Trendalyzer (Motion Chart) team at Google responsible for this great chart type and to Yossi for pointing this example my way ;)

From the Sunlight Foundation Blog:


The gadget gallery has this chart type and others where you can get your own examples to play with...

3 comments:

Magulandia said...

I have to apologize for the poor netiquette here, but I wanted to write you after running across your Google Spreadsheet Timeline Gadget page and this is the only place I could find to reach you.

It is a mixture of pleasure and frustration because I love the idea of Timeline, but I'm not a programmer and I am having difficulty finding a solution to implement my own timeline.

Bottom line is yours would be perfect if you could add more than two bars, and more time period options.

For my case, I need, Months/Years/Decades. I tried using the google gadget with an RSS feed, but it was not updating as it should have, and I could not figure out how to customize the RSS entries to give a time range rather than a point in time. Also, I was unable to change the color.

Anyway, not that I expect you to take requests from a perfect stranger, but I thought being a Google product manager who has taken an interest in Timeline, that you might at least be point me in the direction of a proper solution if one indeed exists.

Thanks in advance,
Naiche

Cameron said...

Hey JR!

Just wanted you to know that the timeline gadget is broken in IE7.

It displays a popup [object error] message now instead of showing any timeline data.

Firefox seems to work but IE7 doesn't anymore.

Love the gadget and I'd love to use it in IE7 for some of my employees.

Cameron said...
This comment has been removed by the author.