Re-visiting a constantly visited subject in visualizing data:
You set it up with a view: a broad, intriguing, mesmerizing view
Sometimes, you might want to leave it there. And keep the reveal as a "figure it out yourself". This is a point of view that you should be able to back up by your goals in the project and your belief in the method by which the data was gathered, your method of presenting it -
But often, you want to continue to reveal, to peel away the layers of that first gorgeous view.
You give another layer where you can begin to navigate this broad view.
On this layer, you can make choices that will change the way you see the data -
And instead of the broad, floaty view, you start filtering it down to focus on one idea, or compare two aspects of the dataset.
The new view that you create may toggle the visualization entirely - such that circles are now mapped as rectangles, making the differences more readable as opposed to a vague understanding in the first view.
There are numerous ways to implement these layers.
Connected China does almost all of them.
Toggles within each view -
Toggles for overall view -
You have the outright zoom, a la Google Maps, say.
But there is also the "spreading out" of data - a timescale, for example, 1900-2013 initially spans from the left to right side of the page. But you can "zoom in" on the timeline, and see just 1900-1910 years spread across.
The mouseover to reveal associated content.
You have the choose and filter.
In this gorgeous NYT story, you have:
The automatically animated toggling:
I encourage you to continue to add to this catalog of methods for filtering and interacting with data. (Comment here or on your own blog).
Finally, the real question is:
1. How many dimensions are you dealing with?
2. How many visualizations do you need to show these dimensions?
3. How can you guide the user through the data, helping them discover the story/tidbits you have found for them as they go?
4. How can you let them guide themselves rather than having to wait for your preset animations to finish?
5. How can you allow comparisons between two forms that the user has already come to understand, rather than constantly removing and remappings, reprojections?
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