Like a Sankey, Alluvial diagrams consist of flows (i.e. the alluvium) between segmented blocks of nodes. That block segmentation can be determined by most any form of organization: spatial, date/time, process step, milestone, etc. Between each block, the flows of an Alluvial diagram show the changes in node composition between each block. Everything I wrote in the preceding few sentences will seem to be complete and utter gibberish if this is your first exposure to the subject, so, let’s just look at an extremely simplified example.

Assume a table where the first column consists of nondescript things. Then assume that, in some unnamed/undocumented/purpose-less process, those things switch between different nodes at different steps (blocks) in the process:

Thing# Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4

1 Node 1 Node 1 Node 2 Node 4

2 Node 1 Node 3 Node 2 Node 4

3 Node 3 Node 3 Node 3 Node 3

4 Node 2 Node 3 Node 2 Node 3

5 Node 3 Node 2 Node 2 Node 3

6 Node 4 Node 3 Node 2 Node 3

7 Node 4 Node 3 Node 2 Node 2

8 Node 4 Node 4 Node 3 Node 1

9 Node 3 Node 1 Node 2 Node 3

10 Node 3 Node 1 Node 2 Node 4

After copying/pasting the above into RAWGraphs input box, selecting “Alluvial Diagram”, and then finally dragging/dropping each step into place, you should arrive at the following:

The 4 vertical (disjointed) black lines are the blocks, and all of the nodes are labeled. The auto-colored alluvial streams connect each node, shifting in thickness to reflect node weight changes between block. Pretty awesome… albeit generic.

Enter the much more interesting and tangible material that is Game of Thrones. Recalling back to the section-header, we sort of had to cover the Structuring of the data first, but are now on to the Sourcing. Nothing fancy here. I simply went to GoT’s IMDb cast list, click-dragged the 740+ rows from Peter Dinklage on down to Noah Syndergaard (ha), and then copy/pasted it all into an Excel sheet (use Paste Special → Unicode unless you want to crash Excel with headshots). I also had to manually add rows for the dragons & direwolves, given their cgi-driven lack of IMDb credits. It took a bit of cleanup from there, which you can see here under the “Col_split” tab in one of my working files.

Once I had the names and episode counts parsed out, I added new columns for my blocks: “Origin”, “Starting Affiliation”, and then several more for “Affiliation at End of” each season. I used the term affiliation here because I thought allegiance is too strong a term for many of the best characters. Case-in-point:

Within each block, I assigned the node-values based on whatever leader, house, or other faction/status that I thought the character was primarily affiliated with at the end of each season. This included the status of being Deceased, an unsurprisingly common “affiliation.”

Consistent with la famiglia take on the show’s popularity, I used the “Origin” values to point back to the Major Houses that most of the characters came from. Across all blocks, I used generic “Other” categories (split by the show’s two fictional continents) to represent affiliation with smaller, more niche groups, or for those who’s status and whereabouts are straight-up unknown. Again, I assigned all of these based on my own viewing of the show, so I’m sure there are plenty of mis-interpretations and outright errors. Super-fans: if you find any that are particularly egregious, please don’t kill me (or worse).

Making the Alluvial diagram

Ultimately, I came up with a “clean” and complete table of some 480+ rows. I stopped short of categorizing all the characters because it became a bit time consuming, and otherwise I didn’t see much relevancy in the affiliations of “Brothel Child #2” or “King’s Landing Rioter” numbers #1- #3 (real characters, look ’em up). Once ready, I simply copy/pasted the table into RAWGraph’s input box and then went on to quickly configure the chart:

After adjusting all the width and height values, I made sure that the Sort by parameter was set to Size. As you can see above, I used the “Episodes” column because I thought that each character’s individual alluvial band should be proportional to his or her importance to the show. Also, the tool allows you to manually select colors for each alluvial band segment, but I left them alone because I think the auto-selections look pretty good.

While configuring all of this, I would occasionally notice errors that had to be fixed back in the original table. A bit annoyingly, I found that the chart, Steps, and Size selections reset after each new copy/paste. However, any inconvenience from that is more than made up for by how ridiculously easy RAWGraphs is to use in the first place.

Finishing the Infographic in Lucidcharts

The .png output from RAWGraphs is easy to load into Lucidcharts by either manual selection or drag-and-drop, and even retains its transparency setting (“Links Opacity” attribute). Once the diagram was in, it was super easy to build, shape, and arrange all of the other infographic elements around it. Within the Page Settings sidebar, you’re able to quickly fine-tune the grid, guide, and snap settings, minimizing the time you’d otherwise be spending extra clicks on “Align to”: