The wonderful Information Aesthetics blog points us to human-computer interaction student Chris Harrison’s Digg Rings visualization. Digg Rings is the latest in a series of awesome visualization projects from Harrison, and it displays a year’s worth of Digg data in an absolutely stunning manner. These are interactive visualizations like those from Digg Labs, but they’re equally beautiful and would make one heck of a poster.
Harrison used the Digg API to grab the top 10 most dugg stories between May 24, 2007 and May 23, 2008. He then rendered those stories as a series of tree-like rings moving outward. Ring thickness is determined by the number of diggs each story received, and color is determined by which of Digg’s eight top-level categories the story falls into.
Harrison created a series of ring graphics showing all stories, as well as breaking them down by month and day (above). He also made rings using the entire set of Digg historical data going back to December 1, 2004. I won’t try to guess what trends one might be able to identify from looking at the Digg Rings (though the above graphic seems to indicate more site volume on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday), but the results are simply gorgeous. Certainly one of the coolest Digg visualizations we’ve seen. You can download full PDFs of the rings at Harrison’s site.
