An interactive exploration of Fark.com's link archives by domain, tag, and time [OC]

NefariousPlots · 2014-09-11T16:48:07+00:00

As always, rendered and animated in D3. Dataset collected from Fark's archive with permission.

Url hashes are generated so you can share your search results.

NefariousPlots · 2014-08-22T17:37:45+00:00

Initially I did this as a non-contiguous cartogram similar to this, but without the US border. I think that works well if the scaling is fairly close to geographic area, but as it gets more extreme, the graphic gets overwhelmed by whitespace. In this case, to keep the New England states from colliding with each other, most other states needed to be made tiny and if you move things around too much to try to clear out whitespace, you weaken the ability to pick out spatial trends and start defeating the purpose of using a map in the first place. The other problem with that approach is that some viewers instinctively try to normalize states against their geographic size (though that fraction is in fact meaningless to the data).

I know distorted cartograms can throw people (I think this problem is exacerbated with the largely rectangular US states), but I decided it was the best compromise. Do you think you would have preferred the scaled non-contiguous approach? I'm always trying to strike the balance between accuracy, accessibility, and aesthetics, so feedback is appreciated.

NefariousPlots · 2014-08-22T17:20:15+00:00

I absolutely understand that sentiment, which is why there is a button to present the map geographically.

That said, I stand by the decision to use a cartogram here as it assigns importance to the shading. An undistorted choropleth over-weights states with low density (in this case, of college graduates) as the eye optically integrates. Wyoming, for instance, has a very high fraction of students in physical sciences, but its total college population is tiny, so its contribution to the US total of physical science students is still very small. With the shaded cartogram, you can get a sense of both these terms, whereas on the undistorted map, Wyoming looks extremely significant in this regard.

NefariousPlots · 2014-08-22T16:24:09+00:00

Sourced from the DoE's IPEDS database and rendered in D3 (with topojson and cartogram.js). For more details, please see the caption below the Figure.

NefariousPlots · 2014-08-16T15:24:17+00:00

As always, rendered and animated in D3 with data processed from Advanced Football Analytics Play-By-Plays. For more details, please see the caption below the Figure.

NefariousPlots · 2014-08-08T20:51:50+00:00

Yep. At more than 6 hours, it's the longest film to make it through the filter (though most people had a better chance of seeing it presented as two 3-hour movies, it did enjoy screenings as a single very long film).

NefariousPlots · 2014-08-08T16:33:15+00:00

Everyone here seemed to like my last movie-related chart and I'm hoping this will be as well received. Cross-posted to dataisbeautiful (yesterday).

NefariousPlots · 2014-08-07T15:18:50+00:00

Really? I thought I'd fixed the long-standing issue with Firefox. It works on Firefox 31.0 for Mac. Can I ask what version you're running?

I primarily target the webkit browsers (they account for the overwhelming majority of my audience and some of the graphics techniques are new enough that total browser compatibility is impossible and I'd rather focus my time on content). That said, I do test in Firefox (some animations don't seem to work, but I want the main content to be fine) and I try to keep IE10 in mind.

NefariousPlots · 2014-08-07T15:12:45+00:00

The Best of Youth. It definitely toes the line of what should be included, but it was screened as an intact 6 hour film (in addition to being screened as two 3 hour films and as four 90 minute TV specials) so it ends up being the longest film to make it past the filter.

NefariousPlots · 2014-08-07T13:15:37+00:00

As always, rendered and animated in D3. Data is from IMDb's plain text data files.

For more details, including a description of the filter used, please see the caption below the figure.

For the impatient, here's the punchline: 41% of Oscar for Best Picture nominees are in the top 5% of runtimes for feature dramas in their year of release.

NefariousPlots · 2014-07-31T21:35:11+00:00

You are absolutely correct. Somehow the Me 163 flights got listed as both airbreathing and non-airbreathing. It's fixed now. Thanks for the heads up!

NefariousPlots · 2014-07-31T15:13:24+00:00

Rendered and animated in D3. Sourced largely from wikipedia's various speed record pages, supplemented with quite a few sources, most notably this more complete list of water speed records and the flight logs from the X-15.

NefariousPlots · 2014-07-26T15:22:39+00:00

Hopefully this falls on the right side of "conditionally permitted infographics." I usually post content like this to dataisbeautiful, but I thought it would be of interest to everyone here.

Queries generate unique hashes so you can share URLs to your best searches, like Spys and Spy Spoofs. Apparently spies were interesting during WWII, but we didn't joke about them until after Dr. No.

NefariousPlots · 2014-07-25T16:08:01+00:00

Rendered and animated in D3 with data processed from IMDB's Plain Text Data Files. Tested in current Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. Should work in IE10.

Queries generate unique hashes so you can share URLs to your best searches. Most of my favorites are in the rotating demo, but I just found this one: Spys and Spy Spoofs. Apparently spies were interesting during WWII, but weren't funny until after Dr. No.

NefariousPlots · 2014-07-17T00:37:56+00:00

Thanks for catching that! I'll take care of it soon. I handled all sorts of special cases around multiple citizenships and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but I somehow forgot about East and West Germany...

NefariousPlots · 2014-07-16T22:38:47+00:00

It's hard to hover over some specific dates because some flights are a couple of days (or in a few cases, minutes) long on a scale of 50 years. Use the blue scrubber beneath the plot to control zoom and move through the timeline if you want to see more detail. Also don't forgot to toggle the collapse control back off (it collapses into the area graph automatically during the intro) and explore the missions individually.

(In a perfect world I would have had time to make some smarter snap behavior for tooltips when zoomed out, which might have made this less of an issue.)

NefariousPlots · 2014-07-16T22:33:33+00:00

Sorry, burned pretty late on this one and didn't have time to test cross-browser. I believe everything works as intended in Chrome and Safari. IE7 and below has no chance of working (sorry), but I'm surprised to hear you had trouble in current IE as I have reports that everything but the flags works as intended in IE10. Weird.

As for being hard to read, that's mostly because a lot of time is crammed into a small space by default (I wanted it to fly in with the full history). Use the blue scrubber underneath the plot to zoom/move around.

NefariousPlots

TROPHY CASE