A thing called “Refined Practice” has made some charts of the first eight months of the lobbying data, here. I have two points.
Point the first, their charts are force-directed bubbles, but they don’t use any network analysis, so once the force-directed algo converges, you get a succession of bubbles of varying sizes in a circle around another bubble. This is far from an ideal way to visualise information. Small-multiple bar charts would be better.
Point the second, I dropped off a link to one of the Project Lobster posts in their comments, which was held in moderation but has now just disappeared. How could it happen?
Hi there,
Thanks for dropping by and taking a look at our visualization of lobbying data. Regarding the points you raise here:
1) We decided to use coloured bubbles to represent the data as it makes it easy to navigate from one minister’s meetings, to a particular organisation, through to another minister etc. We think it works well to quickly give people an overall impression of how many meetings a minister/organisation had and, with the addition of the highlight tool, what kinds of organisation a minister was meeting. Individual bar charts may work better for analysing an individual ministers meetings in detail but would not allow the ease of navigation we were aiming for. You can always dive into the original data if you want to go seriously in depth – links in the related blog posts.
2) The link you “dropped off … in their comments” was just that – it was a naked link with no explanatory text (not even an explanation of what it was linking to). We followed the link, read the article (which was interesting by the way) but it made no reference at all to the data or the visualization the blog post you commented on was about. We can only accept comments that are on topic I’m afraid – hence the pingback to this article is published but the original link wasn’t. Hope that makes sense! Apologies if you had actually posted something longer that was “mangled” before it got to us.
Cheers,
Refined Practice (more a partnership than a ‘thing’)