Visually Graph Data in Twitter with Sparktweets

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Perhaps you’ve seen them popping up in your own timeline: insular, blocky chunks of bar graph data curiously sent out by the people you follow. These visual representations are actually lines of unicode, or standardized web terms used to represent text. On Twitter they’ve been coined Spark Tweets, and they’re the brainchild of two Wall Street Journal employees, editorial project manager Brian Aguilar and outreach manager Zach Seward, who wanted to use it to send visual data across a timeline.

The Spark Tweet project is a derivative of Sparklines, which according to their creator Edward Tufte, are “small intense, simple, word-sized graphic[s] with typographic resolution[s].” To create a Spark Tweet, you can go either go to The Data Collective and input your numbers, or download this Excel workbook from Data Driven and follow the onscreen instructions.

The Wall Street Journal used it to map out jobless claims from the last 10 weeks (pictured above). At this point, Seward points that its current iteration is more of a novelty than anything else, but it is a useful tool for illustrating trends, especially with powerful highs and lows.

Here’s a test I ran with some new Nielsen data that came out this morning plugged-in, which charts vinyl album sales from 2004 to 2010. As you can see, the fetishization of vintage/retro gear really hit its stride in 2008.

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Kind of cool. Not particularly useful if you’re looking for hardline metrics, but whatever.

Go ahead. Play around with it yourself and add the #sparktweet hashtag. Drop us a link to your tweet in our handy dandy new commenting system down below to show us what you’ve come up with.

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