Paul Greenway – Looking Outwards 11

History Flow is a data visualization project by Fernanda Viégas, a senior researcher at Google with a focus on human/AI interaction and data visualization. The project History Flow shows study collaboration patterns on Wikipedia and was on display at the MoMA in New York City. To show such patterns on Wikipedia, Viégas collected the entire past editorial data from various different wikipedia pages and input this data into a script in order to create a legible graphic representation. The resulting visualizations make use of color, patterns, and direction to represent various different events and trends within each page’s history and tell a story about that particular topic from the perspective of all its contributed combined.

I found the project to be a really compelling data visualization with an especially unique focus on something I never would have imagined being visualized. The final images tell interesting stories and show the overall interest / controversial nature about their respective topics.

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