Comments on: Sam Brenner’s Sankey Diagram Generator

By: phineas

phineas — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 14:27:03 +0000

Go to Sam Brenner’s blog to see what he has done in versions 0.3 and 0.4

By: Sam

Sam — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:46:39 +0000

Hey, thanks for the post! Right now I am pulling data out of Obama’s economic stimulus plan – even though it’s quite large, I’m finding it much easier to understand (for someone who is fairly unfamiliar with economics) than the NY budget I was using. Then I have a little bit of coding to do and I should be able to produce the large-scale graphic that I’m aiming for.

Phineas, I was very influenced by the IBM estimated budget chart. I hadn’t seen the Nigel Holmes one before, that is interesting as well. I don’t see a strong need for color for the kind of data I’m using, at least as far as getting the information across goes. It’s the high contrast of the diagrams that attracted me to them in the first place.

By: phineas

phineas — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:23:02 +0000

Maybe Sam’s choice of color is not arbitrary, but motivated historically. There are at least two similar Sankey diagrams for budgets, that use black:
- one from 1940 shown in this post
- one by Nigel Holmes in his 1999 book “Understanding USA”