Description:

For this project, I was interested in visualizing the frequency of occurrence of country names in the subject of books over time. I thought that perhaps the many world events of the past few years may be discernible in the data fluctuations of book checkouts. And, since this project was in 3D, I thought why not visualize something geographical like this on an actual globe. The result is a sphere-based 3D bar graph showing popularity over time of all the major countries around the world based on book checkouts.

Before I could pursue this idea I needed to make sure there was a way of determining the latitude and longitude of every country. Luckily, this information is publicly available on several websites in the form of a CSV, organized by country code (a universal two character sequence unique to each country). Since some countries have special characters or symbols in their title, it was important to sanitize all strings before performing SQL queries, and use the country code wherever possible.

After gathering all the data and visualizing it, I quickly found out some interesting facts. Firstly, the US is the most popular country by far in the SPL database based on book subject. It actually skews the size of many other country bars to be 0 length, so I needed to cap the maximum for a better overall presentation. It's interesting to explore the globe, adjusting the year with the left and right arrow keys, and see significant grow and decline across countries - typically those with heavy news coverage in the observed time range. To visualize this change between years, I included an alternate view of the data. Pressing the 1 key toggles the difference mode, where positive change is visible as green bars, and negative change is red; the more drastic the change, the stronger the intensity of the color.







Code: Soure Code
Website: Link