(This article was originally published at information aesthetics, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
Can big data reveal hidden patterns of political contributions? A new initiative, The Forest of Advocacy [vispolitics.com], developed by what is described as "LazerLAB and the Northeastern Centers for Computational Social Science and Digital Humanities (NECSS/NEDH)", aims to release a new visualization every week, from now on until the election.
Their very first batch of visualizations is titled "Forest of Advocacy", which represent the partisan tilt of individual donations by employees within specific famous organizations. For each organization, individuals are shown as dots that sketch out a trend line over a time period of several decades, revealing how the "balance" of party alliances within organizations tend to change over time.
The visualizations are presented as short Youtube movies, divided in "individuals", the "best donors" and the "organization" as a whole, which all naturally can best be watched in 720p or 1080p HD quality. Accordingly, one can discover the changing partisan preference of people working for organizations like Harvard Business School, Bain Capital, Goldman Sachs, and so on.
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