Class Exercise 01

For this exercise, we took a look at this website, and tried to understand what the visualization was trying to portray. Initially, it looked like a mess, with lines leading to text here and there.

On the X axis, there are dates running in chronological order, from 15 April to 8 May. On the Y axis, there are key terms, running and latest. Tweets were on the extreme right.

Those key terms that were consistent since April, would be considered 'Running' and new terms that were one day old would be considered as 'Latest'. I believe that the visualization shows the key terms that were used most often. If a change was detected, we would be able to see the change based on the frequency of usage.

We can also see the changes in the ranking of the key terms as indicated by the numbers to the left of the key terms. We are able to see what term is being used most often, on which day did that term appear, and what tweets could have caused its popularity.

I believe this visualization is showing the popularity of certain words that were used most often on Twitter. This would give us an indication of what some words are being used on Twitter or on the news with regards to the election, and it also shows us the content of the the most shared tweets. This would help us to see what context the words were being used in, and what tweet was retweeted/shared the most.

Of course, the visualization must show a purpose, and I believe it could be either of two things:

1) to find out the issues that the (online) public are concerned about

2) to find out what tweets or news that affect what people are talking about

One of the things that I liked is the ability to scroll through the various dates, to look out for patterns and information. However, I thought that the tweet or news may be insufficient, as it only provided us with the headline. I thought that it would be better if we could see the lead paragraph of the story (if it is a news story, with an option to find out more) to get a better idea of the context of the situation.

Nonetheless, I thought that this was a good visualization that provided us with much information about the election in the online realm.