
Where do Github users live? WebGL visualization - hawkharris
http://aasen.in/github_globe/
======
arscan
I've been fiddling around with a realtime(ish) geo visualization of github
updates. Fans of the movie WarGames might enjoy the theme:

[http://streams.robscanlon.com/github](http://streams.robscanlon.com/github)

Its a work in progress!

~~~
sneak
I love that you're using IRC as the messaging protocol.

~~~
arscan
Way more fun than redis. I actually like to sit in the channel and watch the
data fly by (its color coded so its actually quite pretty). /connect
irc.robscanlon.com /join #github or /join #wikipedia. You can create your own
channel and stream your own data as well (it'll automatically create a url on
my site for you with that wargame theme). I'm working on other themes that you
can choose from.

And please don't bug the web-* bots that are hanging out in the rooms... they
are the actual web servers and are a bit busy at the moment ;-)

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guard-of-terra
It stacks what I assume to be all unresolved Russian locations to a column the
size of Saint Petersburg in the middle of Siberia.

Same thing with China with a large spike in the middle of Gobi desert.

Same with Canada - apparently some lumberjacks code when it snows too hard and
they can't get out!

I wonder if there is a similar column in the USA and where is it located.

India is surprisingly bare. Come on, you can do better than that.

P. S. Went to update my Location: in github.

~~~
aaasen
Author here, sorry about the spikes where people do not actually live. A lot
of users put only their country and not city, and I didn't want to throw that
data away.

I probably should've checked the specificity of the location and only thrown
out the data for large countries like Russia and China, or distributed it
across all other data points in the country.

Interesting project if you want to fork it!

~~~
guard-of-terra
Distributing it across should work well. Throwing out not so much because
you're losing a varying big chunk of data.

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oscilloscope
Here's a quick 2d visualization of the data using D3.js. The advantage of a 2d
projection is you can see all parts of the globe at once and have quantitative
encodings that aren't distorted by projection effects. In this case,
color+radius encode the magnitude variable, but there is overlap of adjacent
circles.

[http://bl.ocks.org/syntagmatic/6769077](http://bl.ocks.org/syntagmatic/6769077)

~~~
tectonic
Very cool. Also, I didn't know about bl.ocks.org!

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sejje
It takes a minute, for my brain at least, to realize that the darker bits are
the landmasses.

I unconsciously expected the opposite.

~~~
k-mcgrady
I had the same problem. Looked around for about 10 seconds wondering why I
couldn't recognise anything.

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CodeCube
Oh man, I thought it was just me!! Sat here for a while in quiet shame after I
realized it and thought there must be something wrong with me :P

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lechevalierd3on
Good 3d visualization is tricky, this is a good example of a 3d fail. The 3d
here adds more trouble than goods. It makes it harder to see the whole set of
data and it is also harder to compare.

~~~
breck
As someone else mentioned, there's a 2D version as well
([http://bl.ocks.org/syntagmatic/6769077](http://bl.ocks.org/syntagmatic/6769077)).

Personally I loved the 3D version. I found it interesting and __fun __.

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ajmurmann
It would be very exciting to normalize the Github user numbers by the
population in the area they map to. Right now especially in Europe it seems to
pretty much seems to map to population numbers of cities.

~~~
singlow
+1

It does correlate quite a bit to city population, although, the spike in what
I presume to be Austin, relative to Dallas or Houston is quite telling.

~~~
sehr
That was the biggest surprise to me. I know Houston has over twice as many
people but I didn't expect the numbers to be that large of a difference.

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seivan
It took a while until I realized that the black parts were land and gray was
water.

Am I the only one who feel like it should be the reverse?

~~~
anonymous
No, it was the same for me. Seas are dark blue while landmasses are white near
the poles, green in most other places and sandy yellow in deserts - light
colours. It makes me expect lands to be light and seas to be dark, even on a
stylised monochrome globe.

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Systemic33
Any thoughts what the European location that seems to be southwest of Berlin.
Seems to be between Hannover and Leipzig, but there are no major cities there,
and it's strange that its bigger than Berlin.

EDIT: Could be people who just wrote "Germany".

~~~
hwh
Well, it could be my coworkers here in Göttingen, but given that this lovely
little town is about quite the middle of the country, I'm going with your
post-edited hypothesis. Thanks for the hint, though, I was scratching my head
about some of the other points I could not attribute to any city known to me.

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cpfohl
Hmm, would have been nice if the great lakes were still in place in North
America...they're very useful landmarks for us frozen chosen in the American
tundra (read: New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Ontario).

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snogglethorpe
Hmm, I'm little suspicious of the accuracy of these numbers...

I looked at Japan, and there's a very high bar for Tokyo, which is expected
(and a shorter line right next to it which is probably Yokohama)—and then
there's a slightly shorter but still pretty extreme bar that looks like it's
smack dab in the middle of Nagano prefecture, which is relatively speaking,
the boonies. There seems to be almost nothing for Osaka and other big Japanese
cities....

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bnegreve
I find it very hard to read because you cannot see the height of the bar from
above. And when you can see the bar, then you can't see the country.

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datahipster
This is pretty cool! However, I'm going to put on my Edward Tufte hat and
point out that it's probably best to serve up this data in a static table. It
always disappoints me to see sparse, categorical data visualized on a map
since there's no additional context one achieves from the geospatial
components. OP: maybe you could explore visualizing continuous fields, such as
the Earth gravity field:
[http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/gallery/gravity/ggm01_asia_f...](http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/gallery/gravity/ggm01_asia_full.jpg)

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grogenaut
While it looks cool, it only takes you a second to realize that this is kind
of a worthless visualization because to see the height of the bar you have to
spin the globe so the line is parallel to the view plane. If you are looking
straight down, you only get the color.

Remember, 3d isn't 3d, it's 3d projected on a 2d plane. And if this were real
steroscopic 3d, then each of these datapoints would be like the 3d gimmics in
movies like a spear right to your face.

That said I've got this bookmarked because I think at it's base it could be
useful for other visualizations.

~~~
aaasen
I also used the same data in a 3D visualization with the Oculus Rift. You can
check out a demo here:
[http://youtu.be/dgMOdzfoPgs?t=31s](http://youtu.be/dgMOdzfoPgs?t=31s)

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tjmc
Wow - nice work! Are there really that many contributors in Alice Springs or
is the big spike in the middle of the country just a generic "Australia" stat?

~~~
taybenlor
Yeah it seems odd that there are more people in Alice Springs than in Perth.
Must just be "Australia".

~~~
mittsh
I don't think it's Alice Springs. It's probably all users that wrote
"Australia" as location + Alice Springs is actually a little northern that
this bar.

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wallawe
If you're wondering why Andreessen Horowitz felt github was worth the 100M
dollar investment, look no further than India and China. These massive
populations are yet to be tapped for the most part leaving a great opportunity
for future growth. For a company that has been profitable from the get-go,
things are only going to get a lot better in the long run.

Awesome job on the visualization btw.

~~~
bradleyland
I know we're all guessing here, because I assume you don't work at Andreessen
Horowitz, but I don't agree with the bet you're making. When it comes to
online services, China has a tendency to adopt their own versions of services
started elsewhere. For example, Google is dying hard in China [1]. The players
in the social media scene are similarly unfamiliar to users outside of China,
with Weibo leading (I'm lacking citation here).

If Github sees China as an opportunity, they'd better move quick, and look
very deeply at what has allowed services like Baidu and Weibo to trounce
American-born competitors in their market.

[http://www.techinasia.com/china-baidu-qihoo-google-search-
ma...](http://www.techinasia.com/china-baidu-qihoo-google-search-market-share-
war/)

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shubb
It looks like this awesome visualization was done with Three.js, but I wanted
to flag Ceasium[1] to anyone wanted to do 3D 'map stuff' in a browser. It has
some great features, like built in support for CRS systems (hard), WMS/WMTS
client. We got a lot done with it really fast.

[1][http://cesium.agi.com/](http://cesium.agi.com/)

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davidfischer
My GitHub data challenge entry was along a similar vein. The data is stale
now, but it does break it down by project and language which can form some
interesting hotspots.

The globe is a really nice touch and you did a good job on
canonicalization/grouping/binning.

[http://davidfischer.github.io/gdc2/](http://davidfischer.github.io/gdc2/)

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simonholroyd
Seems curious to me that (at least by visual comparison) London looks to be
about 30% larger than NYC, and NYC appears to be about the same as Paris. By
population, you'd expect NYC = London > Paris. Is NYC really still that far
behind in its tech scene? Does Paris have that large a tech scene? Or am I
just reading the chart poorly?

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arxpoetica
It's not showing my data from Antarctica.

~~~
aaasen
It only shows the 1000 most common locations. Sorry!

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metaphorm
The real story this map tells is about the Digital Divide between the First
World and Third World.

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puller
The usual problem with this kind of visualization is that, as you add more
data, you get what is basically just a population density map.

What would be interesting is to see where there are more Github users than you
would expect by pure density of internet users.

~~~
mcosta
This is not the case. Examples: NYC vs SF and Madrid vs Berlin. Well, Madrid
is bigger and more dense than most of the cities with more github users in
this map.

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aliston
Great visualization, but it really needs labels or some other means of
figuring out what city the columns are referring to.

What is the third large spike on the East Coast? I assume the two more
Northern spikes are Boston and New York.

~~~
troygoode
Washington, DC

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lelandbatey
Lane, I don't know if you remember me, but I saw your name and instantly
thought "Of course Lane would build something this cool."

 _AWESOME_ job with this, it's both fascinating and well laid out!

~~~
aaasen
Thanks Leland!

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romland
More visualizations of the same type can be found here:

[http://www.chromeexperiments.com/globe](http://www.chromeexperiments.com/globe)
(some interesting ones) :)

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mittsh
Very awesome visualization work! Though it shows bars in the middle of nowhere
(see France, UK...China too maybe), probably users that haven't mentioned any
city.

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blt
Low quality texture map with seams and bad filtering at the poles. Big
perceptible delay on camera movements. WebGL doesn't make a subpar gfx demo
cool.

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dpcx
This is neat. Would it be possible to add boundary lines? It's difficult to
determine where Louisville Kentucky is without them.

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lambdasquirrel
As with all similar such counts, it would be nice to be able to see them
normalized against the size of the local population.

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smoyer
This might be the most beautiful visualization I've ever seen ... well done.

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Quarrelsome
For some reason the rotation animation and control is incredibly satisfying.

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mratzloff
Nice! Would be cool to have a tooltip over the lines to show the location.

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GeneralMayhem
Cool stuff. That's some gnarly JPEG around the coasts, though.

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Argentum01
Makes me want to commit some code in antarctica...

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CmonDev
I guess, London is the tech centre of Europe.

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jsonmez
Antartica you are disappoint :*(

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mumbi
Very awesome and interesting.

