This is the one for 2008 so far (click for bigger with rollovers).
Friday, August 01, 2008
Movie Box Office Charts
Here are some interesting and pretty Movie box office charts. "Each page displays trends in the top 25 movies at the box office for each weekend in a year. The color is based on the movie's debut week. Because of that, long-running movies will gradually start to stand out from newer movies with different colors." And they were created using Lisp.
This is the one for 2008 so far (click for bigger with rollovers).
This is the one for 2008 so far (click for bigger with rollovers).
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4 comments:
Very rich chart. Reminds me of Tufte's Napolean chart example. I counted 5 degrees, but I probably missed some.
1) movie name, 2) box office $, 3) rank box office $ in week, 4) relative box office $ of a movie week to week, 5) relative movie rank week to week.
He did say "It's inspired by stream graphs and the works of Edward Tufte." :)
I'm not sure those count as 5 degrees. I would say 1) name, 2) weekend box office $ 3) time. The rank and the relative stuff is what comes out of putting in a graph. You don't separately count size of Napolean's army and relative size of Napolean's army over time.
The colors are pretty but I don't think they do much other than making it easier to follow the lines as they disappear. Each month does seem to start a new color family but time is really told on the x axis.
Here's an intersting looking paper on these stacked graphs.
Yeah, I'm not sure you get to count time twice even though it does apply to two things (rank and amt). Degree might not be the right word but rank is different from amount even if it is only represented by the position on the graph.
The army counter example isn't quite the same because it comparing to Napolean's army to itself as opposed to different armies.
You can imagine a version of this chart with just rank (ie all movie areas are the same) and you're definitely missing an additional piece of information.
Ok, I'll give you four dimensions:
1. Time on the x-axis
2. Rank on the y-axis
3. Name identified by color
4. Weekly box office $ shown by height of box
The stream aspect just makes it (significantly) easier to see how rank changes over time instead of having to compare colors of boxes in different columns.
At first I thought $ was shown by area, which would be a problem with (mis)representing a scalar dimension with a 2-dimensional visual, but I think it really is just the height that's used.
The log scale graphs shown on the site I think are just using constant height for $ (compare the largest to smallest they look the same to me, even for a 555x difference between Harry Potter and The Fog in 2005) so it's just showing rank and not amount (except via the rollover). And yeah, that's missing something.
If the boxes were a little larger (in the log scale) the text would fit in and not need the rollover. But I'm not sure that would be an improvement aesthetically.
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