Popcorn and Politics is a data visualization of the relationship between movie-goers and American politics. It is based on the idea that money spent on a cinema ticket finds its way to the film’s producers as their primary source of revenue, which they then can use to donate to politicians. Popcorn and politics reveals the surprising places the viewer’s ticket money can find itself. It was completed as a collaboration with designer Aaron Druck for Alexis Lloyd’s Data Visualization class at Parsons the New School for Design.
The viewer enters the name of a movie in the text field and hits return. This adds the movie’s name to the top row of the visualization and draws lines of varying thickness down to the names of 2008 presidential candidates, representing how much money that movie’s producers donated to that candidate in the style of a sankey diagram. The database was built as a mashup between FEC data, Wikipedia, IMDB, Film-releases.com, and the NYTimes API. The client is written in Flash and the server is written in Ruby using Sinatra.
Popcorn and politics was one of four projects selected from class to present at the New York Times and be featured in their “Data Visualization as a Generative Narrative” video. Our segment begins at 1:17.