Graphing trends

[BenB]

Lately I've been thinking about graphing trends of data sets at work.
More specifically I'm interested in how best I can represent the
trends of multi-dimensional data over time. I need to use an example
to make this clearer. I recently worked for a telecoms software
company so I will take an example from this background; I also hope
this will also be more familiar to the rest of the group.

Let us consider looking at the trend of average duration and distance
of calls for each state in the US. I can draw a graph of this data
for a single point in time simply by putting distance and duration as
values on the axis and then drawing each state as a single point on
this map. I could also go a step further by sizing each point by the
number of calls that are made.

What I would like to know is whether anyone has any good ideas how we
could represent this same information AND how the trend changes over
time.

I had one thought based on a presentation that I saw a professor of
some university give a while back. And this was to animate the graph!

[Brian Mulloy]

Hi Ben B,

You're probably thinking about Professor Roslings work with 3d
animations.

http://www.gapminder.org/

Google acquired some of the technology and it is now a chart type
available in Google Spreadsheets called Motion Charts.

http://www.gapminder.org/blog/gapminder-foundation-blog/make-your-own-graph-google-announces-motion-chart.html

http://www.google.com/ig/directory?url=www.google.com/ig/modules/motionchart.xml

-b