MoneyVis – visualizing private data

In the second week of our data visualization course we had to focus on one bigger project. Most people still worked with UNdata but I decided to choose a data set more important to me. Three years ago I started a small experiment. I keep track of all money I spend. I have one simple text file with one entry per line. Each entry consist of date, price, name of item and category. Because I moved to Denmark recently I decided to add currency information to the prices so I can switch between Polish Zloty and Danish Krone easily. Here are 3 example entries out of 1500


PLN
2005-12-15 3.90 juice @ food
2007-11-09 650.00 trip to venice @ fun
DKK
2008-10-01 3800.00 iphone @ hardware


Because I wanted to display all the data on one graph I decided to convert all the prices to one currency. Euro was obvious choice so I found conversion rates between Zloty – Euro and Kron – Euro for each day for past three years. When I get this data I wrote small script to convert all the prices automatically.

This is first bar chart showing my money spending. Each category has it’s own color and when you move mouse pointer over one of the bars you can see how many money you spend for items in this category in this month.

You can also filter by category to display only this data that you are interested in.

As you can see stacked bar charts are quite confusing if you want to compare categories over time so I invented a nice way to make them more clear by splitting one bar chart into several smaller bar charts.

In one of his presentations Shawn mentioned that they always try do display all the data available. This inspired me to quickly hack displaying data not only for particular months but also for particular days. Because this was quick and dirty code, neither filtering nor separating of categories worked properly but still it was quite impressive. Finally I could see why blue (hardware) bar in October 2008 is so big. It’s my iPhone

Here is my interface in actions. If you want to watch it in HD mode you have to go to the Vimeo website.

The goal of this week was to tell the stories by visualizing data. It was a great experience to show that stuff in front of the audience while telling about my trip to Venice last year of how my cost of living changed after moving to Copenhagen in September 2008.