Motion charts: add categories and animate those bubbles

charte.ca now supports motion charts. Motion charts are basically bubble charts with one more dimension added (usually, it's time). In charte.ca, we use category for this dimension, remember category radio buttons in charte.ca pie charts and bar charts? So, our motion charts are bubble charts with category radio buttons.

Recently, Statistics Canada published a quick overview of interprovincial migration data, using simple line charts. Let's make this data look fancier:

Here are the steps to create this motion chart.


Login to charte.ca and create a new motion chart. Press "Import" button under chart data grid and paste flat migration data borrowed from the Statistics Canada page (and flattened using Excel):

On step 2 of the import wizard, select appropriate raw data columns:

No selection required on steps 3 and 4, and on step 5 I choose not to sort series (Province abbreviation) and category (Year) values.

Tweak the appearance a bit (fonts, titles, colors) and provide a background image with red and green zones and the motion chart is ready.

The visualization clearly shows the following:

• the biggest provinces (Ontario and Quebec) have been relatively neutral in term of interprovincial migration all those years;
• atlanitc provinces are permanent donors (people leaving them);
• British Columbia and Alberta attract people from other provinces;
• Manitoba and Saskatchewan used to be recipients, and became donors in the second half of the 20th century.