Tree Map to Show Losses by Major Companies

Posted by Nathan / Sep 17, 2008 to Infographics / 7 comments

Tree Map to Show Losses by Major Companies

Taking after Map of the Market, the New York Times uses tree maps to show a year of heavy losses by major companies. It's a pretty sad state of affairs. Content aside though, this is certainly one of the reasons the Times is so popular among the infographics crowd. Data visualization isn't just bar graphs and time series plots.

Anyways, back to the subject of the market. Look at the map of the market from today. Red means loss. I'm going to cry. No, not really, but still, it's sad. Okay, I'm crying now.

[Thanks, Michael, keyvowel, and Clyde]

    What now?

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Comments

  • Robert Kosara
    Sep 17, 2008, 11:41 pm

    While it’s a good graph, the use of animation is horrible. There’s a lot of stuff moving, but you can’t follow what’s going on at all. They could have taken a hint from the work behind the SmartMoney treemap (which specifically dealt with how to make the treemap layout stable when values change) and produced a much more impressive and useful visualization.
    But in general, the NYTimes definitely gets it. They are paying attention to InfoVis and they pick what works for a general audience. They’re our best connection with the real world.

  • Nathan
    Sep 17, 2008, 11:55 pm

    Agreed. It’s not the best work out of the Times, but i’ll take the willingness to experiment over same old, same old :)

  • Vincent Theeten
    Sep 18, 2008, 7:51 am

    Does anyone know of an Open Source TreeMap implementation to be used on the web? I’m thinking a Google Charts API but then for tree maps?

  • Robert Kosara
    Sep 18, 2008, 10:14 am

    Prefuse (Java) and flare (prefuse for Flash) do treemaps, as does the infovis toolkit. There are probably other implementations, too.

  • Vincent Theeten
    Sep 18, 2008, 3:34 pm

    Great! It’s a start- it would be great if someone would create a toolkit rendering from JSON or XML data. Summer projects anyone? :)

  • Nathan
    Sep 19, 2008, 1:07 am

    @Vincent - I’ll think about it :)

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