Monday, January 16, 2012

Data Visualization for 'Wie is de Mol?'

For the television show 'Wie is de Mol?' we created a predictions game, in which Hyves members can predict which of the show's candidates is the Mole. For 10 weeks, each week there is an episode of the show, and members participating in the predictions game can change their mind about who is the Mole each week.

With currently more than 125.000 unique members who made a prediction, the project can be called a success, and we have a nice amount of data to create some visualizations.

The chord diagram below shows for each of the show's candidates the number of members predicting he/she is the Mole before the second episode. The chords show how many members transitioned from one Mole to the other between the first and second episode. Note that there are transitions in both directions.

The visualization is created by first dumping the database table containing the predictions to a file. The file is parsed by a Python script, that aggregates the information into a transition matrix. The matrix is visualized with a chord diagram using the D3.js Javascript library.

With the D3.js library you can create interactive diagrams. Hovering the cursor over a part of the diagram belonging to a certain participant, it highlights all the relevant data, as shown below.