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by tuxie_
1813 days ago
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Wow, from the data viz perspective this is super impressive. The amount of data you managed to display and how you organized it is very impressive. Maybe it's the amount of information, but I don't really know what to make of all that data. What conclusions did you arrive to? Where would you point someone like me who feels overwhelmed with all the information on screen? And finally, do you see yourself turning this into a more generic visualization tool for git repos in general? |
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I had two goals (at least) in mind while making this:
1) Experiment with some visualization approaches that I hadn't tried before. The annotated streamgraph, etc. 2) Tell the story of the history of git as a way to demonstrate just how many contributions go into complex open source software.
I definitely got what I wanted out of the experience for the first goal - a large project like this (for me) taught me a lot about how to approach and structure this type of effort, and the limits of some of the technologies that I used.
Regarding the second goal, I had wanted to layer on more of a narrative (using some type of scrollytelling or something similar), but I ended up realizing that that was going to be too difficult with the structure that I had created, so I ended up adding the annotations and leaving some of the narrative reconstruction up to the viewer. If I were to go back to this work, that's what I would try to refine.
In terms of open source, I will do that but haven't yet because things are a bit of a mess and I was honestly tired of looking at it. I'll probably go back to that in a bit.
Applying this to another repository in its current state would require a decent amount of manual data extraction/cleaning, but it's possible. I'm not convinced the results would be that interesting, however. I tried it myself as an experiment and was surprised how linear/regular some of the other repos were.