Post #3: GAME OF DATA VISUALIZATION

http://beta.wind-and-words.com/

Nerd Alert!!

Wind and Words has created a beautiful, interactive, data visualization of Game of Thrones seasons one through six. I didn't get what i was looking at either to start with. But there are several parts so let me break them each down.

Starting with season one, which is the first thing my monkey brain did, it led me to the inter-connected web of characters from season one. This first space shows dialogue between characters. We see here Gendry only talked to three people, and had 23 lines. To anyone who has watched the show, this is crazy to think about! Visually we instantly see the greater circle and zero in on the circle that is not congruent with the others. This lets us know that we should look even closer to this bubble. We understand this is Gendry and lines he spoke in the first season. Then we notice the characters he is connected to, like Eddard Stark. Clicking on him we get even more information because we now we see thicker lines that tells us who characters spoke lines to more often. You can click on all the heads to find out connection and stats, but when your board with that you can use the down directional arrow to see more!

Now that we have left the dialog space, we enter the vocabulary space. We can hover over the words to see how many times they were used and by how many characters. We are also clued in that we can type new words! I typed in "Blame" which was used 1,295 times by just Varys the Spider and Tryion Lannister.

Clicking down once more, we have come to the sentiment space. There are ten episodes in each season and choosing a bubble shows you how positive or negative they were perceived in that episode. We see Ned, doesn't really make a great impression on us until episode six of the first season. If you look at these bubbles without hovering over anything them, it is hard to tell what is going on in this space. But once we do the meaning is created. By using colors we now know this represents every instance of that character. The words and numbers separating the bubbles let us know what our scale is and helps us understand the meaning of their position. Size is also important to highlight in this section. We see the bigger characters of the episode have larger bubbles, while minor roles are smaller bubbles.

Our last space is Data. Here we see familiar charts and graphs. These charts compares data points from season to season. We are still in season one here, but we can compare that to the rest of the series. In the top left hand corner there is a stat chart that compares profanity. The taller the bar the more profanity was in that season. It evens divides up the season by episodes. SO for each season ten episodes are selected and we can see which episodes are more profane. This can be said until we hit word type in the bottom right hand corner. Now we are only seeing data from this season and the word choice use. The number in the middle represents the yellow highlighted section. For all of these chars we see either a hue change or size change. This lets our brain know what the section of data the numbers represent.

All together this is a great site for several visualizations of data. It is fun to get to understand this site. At first glance you are not sure what it is or how to work it. But the further you dive into it the more you learn. For me the sentiment space was the most interesting part because I want to know what happened in the episode to give a character it's rating. This site is targeted to anyone who loves Game of Thrones.