× Close About this experiment

ClockPlot was a result of me practicing graphics drawing with HTML5 Canvas instead of using d3/svg. It was largely an exercise to see how much easier, harder, flexible, or powerful it is in comparison. Initially I wasn't sure what I really wanted to make, but after reading an article by another data visualisation blogger Andrew Wheeler, I am persuaded to try making circular dot plots.

What the diagrams show is the approximate times a group of individuals perform various daily activities, which are colour-coded and can be filtered by individuals or by activity. The position of the dots around the two 'clocks' (AM and PM) indicate the times these activities are most often done. Note that one dot doesn't equal one person; scaling took place for aesthetic purposes.

Activities times are recorded to the minute, and each activity is put into 10 minute time bins and tallied up by bins. Each dot vector represents one of these bins corresponding to the clock time it represents, and the color shows the activity with the highest tally for this particular bin (i.e. the most people doing this activity during this time interval).

To see the raw data that generates these plots, download the CSV file by clicking here.

This was much harder to get going than all previous experiments (save for Gasketch) because I had to dig up my old math books and learn my trigonometry again! And I definitely think D3/SVG is the way to go for future experiments.