Our work with BBC Radio 4’s PM show is yielding interesting results with the fuel prices coming out as the nations biggest concern in these times of tight credit. Yet look closer at the data and it becomes clear that the nations mood has shifted over the last few weeks.

To recap, listener’s are being asked to answer the following question:

What single factor is hurting you most about the credit crunch?

Please select one of the answers below:

Mortgage or Rent
Fuel
Food Prices
Holidays
Other
The Credit Crunch is not affecting me

We generated a new map every 30 minutes, providing an up to date view of the nations mood.

In addition to mapping the data it can also be analysed over time, the image below represents the percentage of answers on May 1st:
On May 1st the nations biggest concern was the price of food, yet by May 3rd fuel had taken over with food slipping back down in terms of overall percentage:
The nations mood over the last few weeks has been changing quite notably over time, perhaps in relations to the amount of media coverage anyone topic has received. Food prices were in the news earlier in the month and now fuel prices are hitting the headlines with the current blockage of London by lorry drivers.

At the present time fuel prices are again leading the poll, you can view the timeline using the interactive version embedded below. Annoyingly Google Docs does not save the viewing preferences when embedding motion graphs so to match our set up simply:

Click below to set both size and colour to view by percentage and move the time slider to gain a unique insight to the nations mood over time.

If you click each circle it will highlight each category in turn to match the images above:

The data poses the question if we as a nation are indeed worried about the credit crunch or is it the media inducing worry by the the amount of coverage given and shock headlines?

You can view the map at http://www.maptube.org with full details on the BBC’s iPM page.

The post Viewing the Credit Crunch Over Time: Motion Graph Mapping appeared first on Digital Urban.

Google’s Docs is something of a slow burner but it has notable potential for visualisation, especially for trends and basic mapping, such as the heat map illustrated above.

The YouTube movie below provides a 60 second introduction to the Google Spreadsheet API:

We will be looking at this closer in future posts as trend/map based visualisation is often too complicated for its own good, one thing Google does well is make things easy and that can only be a good thing…

See http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/ for examples and documentation.

The post Maps and Stats: Visualisation with Google Docs appeared first on Digital Urban.