(top-left) shows the comments that result from a user asking "How do you handle sitting in front of the computer for long periods of time without hurting your health?" from the r/learnprogramming/ subreddit; (top-right) a picture post titled The Milky Way shot last night above the clouds from a mountain top near my house from the r/space/ subreddit; and (bottom) a synthetic flight schedule departing from Adelaide.
A Transfer Graph is a dynamic graph that represents the transfer of items between entities, for example, the exchange of comments between posters on a website or the flights between airports. The Linear Path Encoding is one of the simplest usable visual encodings that can depict this type of data without first applying transformations like projection, aggregation or discretizing the temporal domain. It is intended to be simple so that it is easy to implement and interpret yet also be robust so that it produces complete and unambiguous depictions of transfer graphs. Our primary design criteria for our proposed path encoding is that it uses linear paths to represent entities and transfers, hence its namesake.
In the above examples, horizontal lines are the posters and airports (the entities that can contain items). In the first two examples, the arrows denote that a comment was exchanged between two users, and in the third example, an arrow indicates a flight between two airports.
Example Synthetic Flight Schedule
The following is an interactive synthetic flight schedule. You can hover over the airports or individual flights to empasize them and deemphasize everything else.
Web Comments
The following are interactive depictions of the comment sections of different reddit posts. In each example, you can click on the diagram to show the corresponding comment and vice versa. Comments can also be deemphasized once they have been read.
- A cowboy walks into a saloon...
- ...Aurora Australis hunt at Lake Ellesmere...
- ...sitting in front of the computer...without hurting your health?
Prototype
You can download our C# prototype to generate more images of comments and synthetic flight schedules:
In this section, you can generate an image or an interactive webpage of a single dataset or everyone in a folder, or a sequence of images that show a user browsing comments in order.
In this section, you can generate a flight schedule for all of the incoming or outgoing flights to a selected airport. There are parameters to change the price and duration of the flights.
In the last section, you can generate an image or an interactive webpage of a flight schedule. You can also deemphasize flights and airports that do not satisfy your filter.