Ways of representing frequency of updates as a graph?
Question
I want to create a graph representing the frequency of updates to a site (for example, how often I have posted to my blog over the past 5 years). One obvious way to do this is to plot "number of entries posted per month" for the past 60 months, but this feels unsatisfying. Should I be looking at using something like a rolling average instead? What are good visialisation techniques for displaying this kind of data?
Solution
Some ideas:
- rolling average
- instead of plotting the number of posts plot the time (or rolling mean time) between posts
- if it's something that may have an annual / seasonal component, try plotting it on a circular / spiral plot where r is the datum and theta is the month, day of month, day of year, or whatever scaled appropriately. Some interesting things to plot for r might be
- number of posts in an interval
- cumulative posts (giving you a spiral)
- length of post, (giving each theta it's own exact value, not aggregating)
- you might also want to look at a scatter plot, with something like length of post on x, time since prior post + time to next post on y, and the age of the datum as the size, gray level or color of the point (fading out the oldest ones)
OTHER TIPS
I think the radar chart (or circular area chart) would be a good bet. Take a look at the excellent Choosing a good chart post and PDF chart-selecting-guide over at the Extreme Presentation(tm) Method site.
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