Where do Github users live? WebGL visualization

by hawkharris • 13 years ago

164 88 13 years ago

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.

ddeck• 13 years ago

Ah, I was wondering why there was a large column in the middle of Australia. It actually lines up reasonably well with the only real population center there (Alice Springs), but at ~25k people, it seemed unlikely.

daemin• 13 years ago

I was more surprised by the smaller spike in the middle of Western Australia.

heartbreak• 13 years ago

The "unresolved" column for USA appears to be in Wichita Kansas, or around that area.

bluedino• 13 years ago

Is there a big AT&T datacenter there or something? I've shown up as coming out of there on so many Geo-IP sites over the years, DSL, cellular, T1's...

sanderjd• 13 years ago

Ah! This makes sense. My first thought was "wow, impressive showing in St. Louis..."

TomatoTomato2• 13 years ago

With the state boarders.... Seems pretty close:

http://i.imgur.com/cGuetKg.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_center_of_the_contig...

aaasen4• 13 years ago

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-terra2• 13 years ago

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

bfe2• 13 years ago

It would be nice if there were an easy way to hit the population center instead of geographic center of a nation in webgl-globe, at least. That big spike in the middle of Siberia puzzled me at first.

lifeformed• 13 years ago

Take all the unknowns and spread them evenly among all the known cities.

bfe2• 13 years ago

This also prompted me to add my location in github.

It would be interesting to see if there's a non-negligible difference to run this again in a few days, after everyone who gets word of it also adds in their location.

sejje• 13 years ago

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

I unconsciously expected the opposite.

ambrop7• 13 years ago

I think it's because the seas are textured while the land is all the same color, which is the opposite of how it is in reality.

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

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

CodeCube• 13 years ago

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

pix64• 13 years ago

Definitely poorly design.

ajmurmann• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

nly• 13 years ago

http://xkcd.com/1138/

kutakbash• 13 years ago

Is it really? If you look past Western Europe and North America it is definitely not. And even there you can see things, like that spike in Bay Area. Except for population size, there seem to be at least two more major factors at play: wealth and English proficiency. Even in Europe they are clearly visible: Oslo and Sofia are about the same population, Rome is at least three times more populated than Edinburgh. So, no, not really.

nhebb• 13 years ago

i thought the same when looking at the US, but then I noticed Los Angeles. L.A. is the 2nd largest city in the US, and the smaller spike, compared to its population, is consistent with what I've heard about the tech scene there.

shubb• 13 years ago

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/

mumbi• 13 years ago

Very awesome and interesting.

GeneralMayhem• 13 years ago

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

mratzloff• 13 years ago

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

lelandbatey• 13 years ago

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!

aaasen4• 13 years ago

Thanks Leland!

Systemic33• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

a_bonobo• 13 years ago

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

I think that's it - there's a similar peak right in the middle of Australia with the nearest town being Alice Springs, but I highly doubt commits on the level of Brisbane come from there.

puller• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

wallawe• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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...

cpfohl• 13 years ago

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).

bnegreve• 13 years ago

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.

arxpoetica• 13 years ago

It's not showing my data from Antarctica.

aaasen4• 13 years ago

It only shows the 1000 most common locations. Sorry!

dpcx2• 13 years ago

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

grogenaut• 13 years ago

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.

aaasen4• 13 years ago

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

aliston• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

Washington, DC

oscilloscope• 13 years ago

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

tectonic• 13 years ago

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

blt• 13 years ago

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.

seivan• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

Dewie• 13 years ago

Nope. I was wondering what kind of planet it was.

lechevalierd3on2• 13 years ago

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.

cobookman• 13 years ago

Hard to tell which are continents, and which are oceans.

breck• 13 years ago

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

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

lambdasquirrel• 13 years ago

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

arscan3• 13 years ago

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

Its a work in progress!

error54• 13 years ago

This is a cool take on the data!

lechevalierd3on2• 13 years ago

This is really cool!

yeonsh• 13 years ago

cool!

sneak• 13 years ago

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

arscan3• 13 years ago

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 ;-)

wyck2• 13 years ago

Maybe a button that adds some ominous music :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=uCW...

SiVal2• 13 years ago

Your US labels are displayed on the map of Australia and vice-versa unless I'm misreading it.

arscan3• 13 years ago

Unfortunately I didn't have a chance to finish getting this completely working properly in FF. I assume that's the browser you were using (sorry about that).

romland• 13 years ago

More visualizations of the same type can be found here:

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

davidfischer• 13 years ago

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/

Argentum01• 13 years ago

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

tjmc• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

mittsh2• 13 years ago

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.

jsonmez• 13 years ago

Antartica you are disappoint :*(

snogglethorpe• 13 years ago

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....

mittsh2• 13 years ago

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.

CmonDev• 13 years ago

I guess, London is the tech centre of Europe.

datahipster• 13 years ago

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...

simonholroyd• 13 years ago

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?

Quarrelsome• 13 years ago

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

smoyer• 13 years ago

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

metaphorm• 13 years ago

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

Where do Github users live? WebGL visualization

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