Obesity Mapping through Social Networks
August 6th, 2007
Click above image to view animation
This narrated time-lapse animation from a recent article on obesity spread through social networks in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) does a beautiful job visualizing the issues. Considering that, more and more, folks like the World Health Organization (WHO) are framing the discussion of obesity as an epidemic, being able to watch it contagiously spread through this visual representation is quite powerful. While the colors and lay-out may not have been quite as graphically impactful as it could have been, (colors not quite bright enough, links too thin, etc.) it’s reassuring to observe people working on these important issues avoid a drier presentation of their findings in lue of these dynamic tools made available by new technologies. Hopefully we’ll see more of it as these tools become more accessible.
Link Washington Post article
Link to animation
Link to original NEJM article
See Also: Gapminder, Breathing Data, Vestal Tree Simulator
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August 6th, 2007 at 11:56 am
Very cool, but I’m not sure I agree with their use of circle radius as a metric. Since it looks like they have nothing in place to prevent overlap between the circles, the main claim of the animation about “clustering” is unsupported. Of course, it would seem apparent to the eye that obese groups are clustering more than non-obese groups because they’re taking up more space on the display.
August 7th, 2007 at 7:52 pm
Yup, as you point out Dave, it’s really easy to “lie with maps”, even when you don’t mean for it to happen. And without more visible lines to make out the connections in the image, it’s difficult to determine just how true your criticisms are.
August 8th, 2007 at 12:43 pm
At that scale the circles don’t express diameter well, but at larger sizes (http://www.style.org) they can – IF they either displace each other as Dave suggests, or are rendered transparently so their colors aggregate via the increased opacity of their overlap.