Bubble, bubble toil and trouble

Recently we wanted to show how Concentrate, our new long-tail search analytics tool, could give you a view of search patterns across travel websites. As political junkies, we were inspired by this chart from our friends at the NY Times.

NY Times candidate word bubble chart

The first tool we tried, simply on principle, was Excel 2003. As expected, making a NY Times quality bubble chart in Excel 2003 is a hard problem. Here's a draft of how far I got before giving in to label fatigue.

Excel NY Times bubble

The bubbles themselves aren't tough, but getting the labels right is hard. I'd love to see a solution, so if any reader wants to tackle it eternal fame can be yours. Here is a CSV if you want to try.

travelpatterns.csv

Another of the tools we use at Juice is NodeBox, which we used to make this:

Concentrate pattern comparison

Here's the code that made the graph.

The power of a programmatic approach like this is that by changing a line or two, you can get the following. Click for a larger version. Click the text for the code..

With great power comes a great need to exercise restraint. Otherwise you end up like these poor chaps. Must... flex... restraint... muscles...

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. All source code is released under a BSD License unless otherwise specified.

17 comments | Show all comments only the last 5 are shown


January 16, 2009
chip said:

Rob Bovey has an xy chart labeler that may have helped on the original Excel version. I use it a lot and it provides a good degree of flexibility on placement.

http://www.appspro.com/Utilities/Utilities.htm

The labels are not dynamic which is a drawback. It works on other types of charts too.


January 18, 2009
Andy Cotgreave said:

Hi Clint,
Yes, I did initially add the text. However, in Tableau it somewhat overwhelmend the circles. I did try to format the text to grey and shrink it, but the text only served to confuse things.


January 19, 2009
Chandoo said:

Hi Chris,

Good stuff...

I have tried the same in excel while keeping the labels right (I guess so). You can take a look at the chart and downloadable excel here: http://chandoo.org/wp/2009/01/19/excel-bubble-chart/

Let me know your comments


February 9, 2009
David Franta said:

Didn't really find another place to post this, but interesting article posted by Cringely (ZDnet fame) about how JP Morgan mangled a bubble chart recently -

http://blog.cringelysmortgage.com/2009/01/29/whats-wrong-with-wall-street/


February 22, 2009
Mike Chelen said:

How about using the Google Charts API scatter plot? http://code.google.com/apis/chart/types.html#scatter_plot
It allows variable bubble sizes, and has been used in some similar charts such as http://www.xefer.com/twitter

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