I stumbled on this while looking up some old docs and thought it would be great post. Really this is a lesson learned.
Almost 2 years ago we set out to do a project with some big data on mobile. We were feeling really smart, and started with a large data set from twitter about sediment during the olympics. We were looking at other big data visualizations and we came across one that was sort of like a sunburst chart on political climate. We modified this and with the help from some of our designers and developers we built the following visualization.
We thought it was great and as part of this visualization you could control the filters or time. The main visualization would reflect sentiment for a specific category based on all the twitter data we had.
Well, turns out, we stole this idea from Florence Nightingale and she created it in the 1850’s. Her visualization dealt with patient mortality in military field hospitals.
The pont here is that even with all our great advances in the areas of analytics and data, sometimes is been done before and it many not be as complex or as great as we thought…
Thanks to the folks in design and dev who worked on this project and thanks to @pgkiran for figuring out that we just copied this concept with out even knowing it.
Lesson Learned!
The Viz Underground 