Matt Hurst over at Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media points to this interactive map on the NY Times website to track political campaign funding. I guess I’m spoiled by the Trendalyzer mentioned in my previous post, but this level of interactivity is downright tame. It’s smooth and somewhat usable (although the banners and nav at the top of the screen cut of the date range controls so that I didn’t see them until I was done looking at it), but I craved for more interactivity and exposing relationships.
The thing I really wanted to somehow have the ability to overlay two or more candidates’ funding bubbles. Flicking between the two, Obama clearly gets more support from the Chicago area than Guiliani, for instance (which is no surprise). But what other interesting connections and relationships might also be revealed? How’s Barack stacking up to Rudy in NY? Or how about bubbles for Dems vs Reps? I don’t want to knock the NYT for doing this, but there just seems like so many other easy targets that could have made this so much better.
BTW, check out Matt’s blog for other neat things going on in the text mining and analytics realm.
EXPERIENCING INFORMATION 