I just wrapped up work on a visualization for the 2009 Last Supper Festival. The work visualized a series of conversations during a symposium on the topic Identifying Our Means.  After three short presentations, four groups were formed to discuss a number of topics, periodically rotating the group members from one table to the next. At each table was a note taker who recorded as close to verbatim who was saying what and when, with the help of an automatically time-stamping spreadsheet.

Once the data was collected, a number of scripts were written in Python to extract, convert, clean, and export the data in addition to performing some basic analysis. Finally, I used the Prefuse Flare library to create an animation at 40x real time of the interaction between people and key topics. Below is a still frame from the animation.  Click to load the animation.

Special thanks to David Friedlander, Chris Kennedy, Stephanie Nikolopoulos, and Reid Rogers for collecting the data (taking notes) during the event!