Professor Mike Batty from University College London has a new visualization method called ‘Rank Clocks’ which plot data radially out from the center, showing the change over time.
A rank clock is a device for visualising the changes over time in the ranked order of any set of objects where the ordering is usually from large to small. The size of cities, of firms, the distribution of incomes, and such-like social and economic phenomena display highly ordered distributions. If you rank order these phenomena by size from largest to smallest, the objects follow a power law over much of their size range, or at least follow a log normal distribution which is a power law in the upper tail.
Looks interesting, and the individual plots show the variation over time quite well.
Rank clock of the top 100 high buildings in New York from Michael Batty on Vimeo.
via Digital Urban: Visualising Space-Time Dynamics in Scaling Systems: Rank Clocks.
