Quite a few years back, I got really interested in Treemaps. The whole project had started as an academic discussion between a friend and I on how hard a treemap would be to build (they seemed to be a pretty popular data visualization method back then, though I don’t see them around much these days). Anyway, what I thought would be trivial weekend hack turned out to be a lot more involved and I ended up reading and implementing Mark Bruls, Kees Huizing, and Jarke J. van Wijk’s algorithm for an optimum Squarified Treemap implementation (in ActionScript 3, you can find all the code which I open sourced here).
To demo the algorithm, I took the visual aesthetics of Marumushi’s NewsMap but instead used it to show trending topics on Digg.com. The project, not so creatively named DiggGraphr, got fairly popular and was mentioned on a few data visualization blogs and even won an award for a Digg.com API contest.
DiggGraphr has been dead for a while now, but I was pleasantly surprised to have it be included in a research paper titled ‘A case study on news services using big data analytics (뉴스빅데이터 서비스 사례 및 모델 개발 연구)’ conducted by professor Kim of the Korea Aerospace University and three researchers from a non-profit research organization (Media and Future Institute).
If anyone of you can read Korean, feel free to read the paper here
Code Zen 