Brockmann et al video wins the non-interactive media category in Science 2009 Visualization Challenge
Ever wonder where your dollar bills travel after you plop them down for a cup of coffee? The Web site Where’s George? allows you to do just that: Record your bill’s serial number and then track its journeys as other people spend it across the country. But it’s more than just a game. Because every time a dollar is spent in a new place, it means someone moved it there. Christian Thiemann and Daniel Grady of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have been using the Web site’s data to study how people move within the United States.
They produced this video to explain their project and animate the results.
Tiny bills stretch out from county to county on a map of the contiguous United States. Some places, such as Los Angeles, California, have many bills passing through it from across the nation, while others, such as Anderson County in Tennessee—Grady’s home—have just a few that mainly cycle locally. From this travel data, the team ran computer algorithms to find what they call effective communities within the United States. People tend to travel more within these invisible boundaries than outside them. In the video, counties flash and wiggle as the computer algorithm tries to decide which counties belong in the right community. “Normally, … you just push a button and wait for 2 hours and then all you get are numbers, which is really boring,” Thiemann says. “But [the animation] makes the process visible and shows you how interesting it can be.”
Grady hopes the video will stimulate other people to think up new ideas about what to do with these data. They’ve already started using it to study how diseases, such as H1N1, spread, and linguistics professors want to compare these travel boundaries to dialect boundaries.
Panel of judges member Corinne Sandone thought the video had a whimsical, quirky appeal, like that of independent films. “I liked the extreme geekiness of it and how it made me want to watch it again to absorb it all,” says judge Thomas Lucas. “It was so rich.”
