The first visual analytics that caught my eyes in recent weeks is this graph in this medium article.
This visual appealed to me first because of the data. There are thousands of entities being represented in this visual. The data is from Facebook groups discussing COVID-19 vaccines in July and August. The visualization is a network graph which shows the connections between different groups. Here the research was focused on what links were being shared, how much, where, and political viewpoint, and all of this is represented in the visualization to show the relationships between each variable. The model was formed by mining through data in the CrowdTangle database. Then every time a group shared a connection or a link, it was tallied, over the nearly six thousand groups represented. The resulting model reveals the clusters in the conversation allowing us to see where and what conversation is taking place. From this visualization knowledge can be gleaned from it such as those in the “anti-science” cluster heavily rely on YouTube links and especially YouTube short links. The large size of the youtu.be node suggests many links are being directly shared instead of copying the link in the URL.
For me visual analytics, especially network graphs such as this one are very interesting as they reveal the relationships between individuals or groups that otherwise are not as obvious without the further analysis.
Source:
Visualization Source: https://adico11.medium.com/a-conversation-divided-a-covid-19-vaccine-is-still-in-the-making-but-remarkable-polarization-6735f2bc06a3
