Interface Digital Labs

Data visualisation of mobile lawsuits

It started with the NY Times, who were trying to understand why there was a sudden spate of lawsuits between tech firms over mobile phone technologies.
The NYT article included an infographic to try and make it easier to understand what was going on, however, it does little to make the subject more obvious.

Earlier this month, an article in The Guardian covered essentially the same ground, and also included an infographic that was little or no better. Apple is suing HTC, Microsoft is suing Motorola, and Nokia is suing just about everybody.

Other people tried to rework the graphic, including data visualisation guru David McCandless at the Information is Beautiful site. This added additional infomation, including what the object of the lawsuit was, and some indication of the size of the players.

The best reworking I came across was by George Kokkinidis, which used a circular graph format, which mades it easy to see at a glance who’s throwing brickbats at whom. It spatialises the players aroung a ring, creating an arena into which their lawsuits do battle.

Making it interactive

But as a static image there is always a limit to the amount of information that can be portrayed here, and also, the information is quickly out of date, or sometimes plain inaccurate.

It seems to me to be a perfect example of where an interactive piece of data visualisation, or spatialisation as I would prefer to think of it, can show more.

So this is what I created, after a couple of hours, in Flash, using the Kokkindis visualisation as a starting point. One thing that became apparent is that there is a mismatch between what George Kokkindis has drawn and the data source spreadsheet that McCandless’ infographic works to. Evidently, more fact-checking is required.

This is version 1.0, little more than a clickable version of the original graphic, and drawing details of the suit from the data McCandless is publishing. But I think it shows the potential for bringing this subject matter more vividly to life.

Next steps

Future enhancements include:

1. Adding company logos and some representation of size, eg market capitalisation.
2. Pulling data from an external data source so that it can be kept up to date easier.
3. Building a display engine to dynamically show lawsuits, and companies, so that it can work with rapidly changing data.
3. More details, including dates and sources, about each lawsuit.
4. A timeline view so it’s possible to see the history of this legal gunfight. Lawsuits could be shown as resolved, and then fade out over time.

Basically this will involve moving from an interactive graphic to a dynamic visualisation system. I’ll be digging further into this, and testing out the Flare toolkit for Flash/ Flex, and other languages such as Processing and openFrameworks.