Lately I’ve become interested in the design of visualizations that draw out patterns in habit & routine. To explain what I mean, here are a bunch of nice examples…
Let’s start with a visualization of a twitter user’s posting habits from xefer.com:
This simple diagram of a baby’s sleep times comes from Trixie Tracker:
Simple but effective! Thanks to Nathan’s flowingdata for these two examples. (See also a wonderful visualization of the stabilization of a baby’s sleep patterns in Winfree “The Timing of Biological Clocks” Page 31, also shown in Card et al “Information Visualization…” Page 5/6).
It seems that some form of heatmap is the most common means of representing habitual behaviours – see e.g., Andrienko et al for a visualization of traffic densities around Milan (red is lots of traffic):
This picture of hotel visitation patterns (Weaver et al) shows the number of visitors over a weekly timescale:
I like the summary at the bottom and right of the main area showing aggregated trends.
Nathan Eagle & Alex Pentland’s paper on “Eigenbehaviours” differentiates various routine patterns from a dataset & presents them clearly:
This reminds me of Wijk & Selow’s classic paper too.
Does anyone have any suggestions on other visualizations of habits and routines?
I personally like the weather pattern visualizations using two-tone pseudocolouring by Saito et al., InfoVis 2005. ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/10260/32681/01532144.pdf
Of course there is also the MERL paper on visualizing the history of living spaces (InfoVis 2007 ‘Best Paper’) http://www.merl.com/reports/docs/TR2007-068.pdf
Nice post!
interesting post, joe.
small note: the first plot of twitter activity looks quite similar to (unnormalized) hinton diagrams.
http://www.xoxosoma.com/tokyo-tuesday/ streamgraph for showing habit & routine – hit reload for another statistic
Thanks to Nils over at http://ebiinterfaces.wordpress.com/ for a pointer to a nice NYTimes visualization of habits: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/07/31/business/20080801-metrics-graphic.html