Twitter Visualization using Spirographs

This paper explores the use of Spirographs to display data from Twitter feeds. The authors first identified particularly interesting Spirograph patterns and gave them flower names reminiscent of their visual features. They then further investigated one particular scenario using customized Spirograph patterns: the visualization of Twitter data during an academic conference. The resulting visualization is appealing and efficiently shows the distribution of tweet data over time, including trends over both shorter and longer time spans. These early results show that Spirographs have an effective attractiveness and structural features that make them a perfect candidate for the ambient display of temporal data.