The claim: 'Here’s a resource that can help you understand a piece of legislation that has profound impacts on issues related to food, nutrition, fiber, natural resources and more'
The Farm Bill Budget Visualizer, a project of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, uses interactive “treemap” technology to share information about the budget of the Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008, aka the 2008 Farm Bill. Treemapping uses nested rectangles to display data, allowing users to “see” the federal funding received by programs within the Bill, and to examine how funding has been allocated across a range of issues from public health to commodity grain production to conservation.
The primary goal of the Budget Visualizer is to serve as an education aid that will improve understanding of the Bill, and that will help users identify and share information about issues of concern. The Visualizer and its underlying budgetary data (not otherwise available) will also be useful to advocates, policy-makers, researchers and the media.
What are your thoughts? Is this interesting? Complicated? Fun? Informative? Confusing? Functional?
I don't find it to be as much of a visualizer as a content organizer. It's a really complicated issue, so this simplifies a bit, but I could use more... maybe the audience has more time to dig around than I.
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