I made these videos using Processing, a Java-based language, to make these data visualization videos of welovelocal’s London reviews over time. They span from the start of welovelocal to January 29th, 2008. The colour of each dot represents the rating of each review with red being 1 star and green being 5 stars.

Back in July, I posted a blog post about an image I made called London Lights, which used the welovelocal database to map all the businesses in London to a point on a map. Well, now that we’ve gone nationwide, I have even more data to play with!

So this is the second in the series, if you include the July one. This doesn’t really have a name at the moment, so if someone wants to christen it, let me know in the comments!

This is a typographical map of the UK, using the structure of welovelocal and the amount of businesses in that area. The more businesses in an area, the larger and brighter the text. The position of the text is based on the geographical position.

Some towns maybe not be as bright as you expect (for example, Manchester), as they are broken down in subtowns (e.g. Oldham, Bury, etc). It’ll make more sense when you view it.

View UK Word Map (2000×3000px)

I’m a bit of a stats and data junkie. There’s nothing I like better than analyzing data over a hot cup of fruit tea. Yes, really. Forget death metal, internet pornography, and class A drugs… I like data analysis and I’m proud to admit it. With welovelocal, I have such a wealth of statistics that if they were real, I would rub them against my naked body… possibly. So, with all this data, what else can I do, but analyze it?

This is the first in an indefinite series that I will be posting over the days, and months, and maybe years. The first, tentatively titled ‘London Lights’, is an image of nearly all the businesses on welovelocal and where they are positioned on a map. Now, it would be no fun to have an actual map on the image, it’s much more amusing to work out where areas and roads are based on the lights on the image. See if you can guess where Regents Park, Upper Street, the Thames and Kentish Town Road are?

Download London Lights in massive 1600×1200 wallpaper size