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It does look nice... and it does raise interesting questions. I'm particularly intrigued as to John Kerry, John Edwards, and Joe Lieberman's presences in that a

It does look nice... and it does raise interesting questions. I'm particularly intrigued as to John Kerry, John Edwards, and Joe Lieberman's presences in that anomalous 108th Congress. Can you tell us any more about how you define an "agreement group"? Visually, the result reminds me of [http://xkcd.com/657/ http://xkcd.com/657/] - is this sort of diagram a recognised concept in data presentation, or a new idea? [edit - hmm... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/108th_Congress http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/108th_Congress]

toyg 14y ago
Those three all voted to invade Iraq. There were probably a number of related votes for logistical and budgetary arrangements to start that operation.
- EvilTerran 14y ago
  Yeah, hence my edited-in "hmm". When I first wrote that post, I hadn't yet hit that Wikipedia article, and, as a non-USian, I don't know what years which Senate sat for off the top of my head. Makes more sense now.
friggeri 14y ago
I was not aware of this xkcd comic, funny how things seem to pop out. My inspiration was more in the line of Sankey diagrams. Among others, the famous map of Napoleon's invasion of Russia by Minard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Minard.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Minard.png). I've called this representation a "groupflow" but any name would do. The notion of agreement departs a little bit from the classical fraction of common votes/total votes and instead is based on a vector model of votes, using cosine similarity as a value of agreement. The agreement groups are computed by heuristically optimizing a quantity called the cohesion and which turns out is really correlated to the way people perceive social communities (the old preprint of the first paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1107.3231.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1107.3231.pdf).
- specialist 14y ago
  Minard's graph is brilliant. On my to do list: a graph that shows the loss of voters casting ballots. I needed a way to show how postal balloting disenfranchises voters (what it gives, it equally takes away). Voting age population -> registered to vote -> voter received ballot -> returned ballot -> elections rcvd ballot -> signature verification -> challenged ballots -> overvotes/undervotes, voter intent, adjudication -> tabulated.
- EvilTerran 14y ago
  Actually, now you mention it, I think I remember seeing the author of XKCD mention that he was inspired by Minard's diagram. I'm afraid your paper's too much for my brain on a Sunday morning, but the diagrams and typesetting look really well done :)

toyg 14y ago

Those three all voted to invade Iraq. There were probably a number of related votes for logistical and budgetary arrangements to start that operation.

EvilTerran 14y ago
Yeah, hence my edited-in "hmm". When I first wrote that post, I hadn't yet hit that Wikipedia article, and, as a non-USian, I don't know what years which Senate sat for off the top of my head. Makes more sense now.

friggeri 14y ago

I was not aware of this xkcd comic, funny how things seem to pop out. My inspiration was more in the line of Sankey diagrams. Among others, the famous map of Napoleon's invasion of Russia by Minard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Minard.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Minard.png). I've called this representation a "groupflow" but any name would do. The notion of agreement departs a little bit from the classical fraction of common votes/total votes and instead is based on a vector model of votes, using cosine similarity as a value of agreement. The agreement groups are computed by heuristically optimizing a quantity called the cohesion and which turns out is really correlated to the way people perceive social communities (the old preprint of the first paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1107.3231.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1107.3231.pdf).

specialist 14y ago
Minard's graph is brilliant. On my to do list: a graph that shows the loss of voters casting ballots. I needed a way to show how postal balloting disenfranchises voters (what it gives, it equally takes away). Voting age population -> registered to vote -> voter received ballot -> returned ballot -> elections rcvd ballot -> signature verification -> challenged ballots -> overvotes/undervotes, voter intent, adjudication -> tabulated.
EvilTerran 14y ago
Actually, now you mention it, I think I remember seeing the author of XKCD mention that he was inspired by Minard's diagram. I'm afraid your paper's too much for my brain on a Sunday morning, but the diagrams and typesetting look really well done :)