treemap

• Exploratory treemap for Obama’s 2012 budget proposal

  February 15, 2011 to Statistical Visualization by Nathan Yau

  

  It's that time of year again. Obama recently released his 2012 budget proposal for how to allocate $3.7 trillion. It's complicated no doubt, but Shan Carter and Amanda Cox of the New York Times make it easier to understand with their interactive treemap. Rectangles are sized by proposed spending and colors indicate percent change from previous year. Darker red rectangles represent bigger drops from the 2011 budget and darker green greater increases. Zoom in and pan as you please.
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• An Easy Way to Make a Treemap

  February 11, 2010 to Tutorials by Nathan Yau

  

  Back in 1990, Ben Shneiderman, of the University of Maryland, wanted to visualize what was going on in his always-full hard drive. He wanted to know what was taking up so much space. Given the hierarchical structure of directories and files, he first tried a tree diagram. It got too big too fast to be useful though. Too many nodes. Too many branches.

  The treemap was his solution. It's an area-based visualization where the size of each rectangle represents a metric since made popular by Martin Wattenberg's Map of the Market and Marcos Weskamp's newsmap.

  Here's a really easy way to make your own treemap in just a couple lines of code. We're looking to make something like the above.
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