Wednesday, January 25, 2017

Visualizing word popularity: Scrollytelling, line graphs, micromaps, etc.

Another day, another visualization coming from Google News Lab, now in collaboration with Polygraph: The Year In Language 2016. It combines scrollytelling with multiple animated and interactive charts to highlight words which grew in popularity during 2016. Think of terms like “bigly” and ”gaslighting,” for instance.

(Full disclosure: I'm a consultant for Google News Lab's visualizations, as I've mentioned before.)

My favorite part of The Year In Language 2016 is the linked micromaps at the bottom of the page. Here are the ones for the aforementioned words: