Here is the creation from Paul Butler, an Intern from Facebook.
Facebook (Facebook) Intern Paul Butler was interested in the locations of friendships, so he decided to create a visualization of Facebook connections around the globe.
Butler wrote a fascinating Facebook note explaining some of the challenges he faced creating his visualization:
“I began exploring it in R, an open-source statistics environment. As a sanity check, I plotted points at some of the latitude and longitude coordinates. To my relief, what I saw was roughly an outline of the world. Next I erased the dots and plotted lines between the points. After a few minutes of rendering, a big white blob appeared in the center of the map. Some of the outer edges of the blob vaguely resembled the continents, but it was clear that I had too much data to get interesting results just by drawing lines. I thought that making the lines semi-transparent would do the trick, but I quickly realized that my graphing environment couldn’t handle enough shades of color for it to work the way I wanted.
What do you think of the visualization? Let us know in the comments.
No comments:
Post a Comment