Sunday, August 28, 2011

Viz: An Interactive Visualization of British History

This visualization presents the history of Great Britain divided into interactive data blocks. The density of events is displayed on the map. It covers all the important events ranging from 6000 B.C to 2011. At the first glance, it is not very evident that this visualization has a huge amount of data embedded in it. But it really has a huge capacity. Each color represents a certain period of time, for example bronze age, iron age etc. Events are represented with white dots. As we press on a dot, a window pops up giving us little information and any links related to that event. We can zoom in onto any age by clicking on that particular region of time.

Apart from that a time line has been given at the bottom which can be used for navigation. We can also search for events related to a particular thing with the help of the search box given at the top. This visualization covers all the important events in the history of British empire. We can also look at the events related to only a particular region by selecting the regions at the top. The 'Take a Journey' at the bottom groups the events into different types and shows us those types. By clicking on one of those types, we get a list of all the events of that type shown in the increasing order on the timeline.

This visualization is done in flash by BBC. One unique thing about this visualization is the amount of data that can be visualized.

References:

Reference 1

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