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October 3, 2007
US elections donations: a visual approach
Some weeks ago, discussing with Marco in front of a cup of coffee, an interesting data source emerged: the database of followthemoney: it offers a comprehensive coverage on money transfers from donators to parties candidates all over the US.
Above a screenshot from the Java Applet
We started thinking from some past inspirations and after some discussions and some more coffes, Marco started to develop a first prototype as a Java applet ( based on the fantastic Prefuse ) in order to understand some relations among candidates and donators.
The representation is quite simple: a graph in which nodes are related each other using oriented arrows ( they represent the direction of money transfer ) having on them the exact amount of donation; the stroke of each arrow, instead, represents the relation between the single amount and the maximum one.
Some considerations:
- a lot of small donators give almost the same amount of money to both parties
- the stroke of arrows should be not linear connected to the maxmium amount but, maybe, using some exponential relation in order to pay attention to the behaviour of small donators.
In next weeks we would like to go deeper in designing and devloping such tool, in order to release it soon as a free Java Applet.
In the meanwhile you can have a look to some more screenshots.
I would like to say "thank you to Marco for the efforts provided till now and for sharing this.
Feedbacks and comments are welcome.
IA / Information Architecture, Ideas, infoVis / information visualization / infoviz, Projects, resources, rias / Rich Internet Applications, User Experience, User Interfaceshttp://www.mentegrafica.it/blog/2007/10/03/us-elections-donations-a-visual-approach/
Posted by InfoVis at October 3, 2007 6:12 AM
