[Click to embiggen—if it doesn't scroll for you once it's enlarged, try going to Reader View first —Ed.]
By Sarge
This is the scatter chart of 269 TOP readers* who responded to Mike's post "Film vs. Digital (Not What You Think!)," a sleeper of a TOP post. [And here is the post with Sarge's first attempts at this chart —Ed.] The chart is long, as befits the long collective experience of TOP readers shooting film (a "deep well" as DD-B puts it). Only 800px wide (the maximum allowed by the Typepad template), the chart is nonetheless wide enough to encompass the entire history of digital photography. When you scroll from the bottom of the chart up, you are going back in time 75 years to 1945. Likewise, you go back to 1990 when you read it from left to right along the Digital Years axis.
TOP's estimable Commentariat is well represented here. But the chart also includes several readers who were commenting for the first time, I think. I'm also glad that some readers who are digital natives like me (0,11) also commented. The 269 names in the chart is just a minute fraction of TOP's regular readership. It took some doing (see below) fitting all 269 within the chart. At its current size and aspect ratio, maybe up to 80 more readers' names can be accommodated in the chart with enough white space left for readability. Laborious though it was, I had fun making the chart as an homage to Mike's original post and a tribute to my fellow TOP readers.
The chart's Film Years and Digital Years axis labels (left and bottom) and that of the calendar years axis (right and top) are both five units (in years) apart. But they are not equidistant, graphically. That's because I "dilated" the middle grids of both axes to create more elbowroom since that's where most of the responding readers are. In other words, the space-time of the middle grids warped as a result of the combined gravitas of the TOP readers situated therein. The most densely populated grids for Film and Digital are, respectively: F30–40 (1980–1990) and D10–20 (2000–2010).**
It seems to me that the TOP readership (as represented by the readers who commented) is normally distributed, albeit "skewed to the right." Not that a distribution which "skews older" is a demographic feature unique to TOP's readership. With life expectancy rising all over the world, skewing older is the new normal, in my opinion. What may be unique about the chart though, is that the outliers are right on the margins or near it.
That many TOP readers had common coordinates contributed to the crush at the center. The green dots are shared by three readers, the red ones by two, the blue dots are unique combinations. Leader lines are provided linking readers' names to the green and red dots shared by them. Also to the blue dots when it isn't clear which dot belongs to whom. The "leader lines" are automatically generated by Excel, but positioning the names around the red and green dots and several of the blue ones had to be done manually. This was the easy part.
Dilating the middle grids also meant generating a separate chart for each differently-sized grid. The scatter plot is actually a composite seven stacks high by three frames wide, or 21 charts in all. Each frame was exported to Paint and stitched together to form a stack, which in turn were stitched together to form the whole scatter chart.
The hard part was fitting together the component charts in Paint and Excel*** which was manually done by eye and hand. And this has to be accurate down to the pixel or the dots and names won't line up across frames, not to mention the edges of the stacks. When these do not align, you go back to Excel and start over. I've had a much easier time stitching hand-held photos using Hugin, an early panorama executable. There must be an app for this sort of chart somewhere. Well, as Ctein used to say, "nobody cares how hard you work" to get things right.
Sarge
Here is Sarge's website
Notes:
*The 269 names in the scatter plot include readers who commented to the follow-up post. The master list of readers and their respective Film and Digital years can be found in this Google sheet. The readers' names are spelled as they appeared in the Comments section (minus diacritical marks, if any).
**The initial year label (2020) of the calendar years axes is omitted because we are not quite there yet. This has no effect on the value of the readers' Film and Digital coordinates.
***Paint 3D allows you to warp a selected part of a graphic (to get a fish-eye view) but I wanted a rectilinear printer-friendly chart. I use a 2013 Student Edition of Excel. In this version, the chart area has clickable dimensions but not the plot area where all the work gets done.
Original contents copyright 2019 by Ferdinand Garrido. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Scott Moore: "This is a real gift to the community. Thanks, Sarge, for your effort and diligence on this."
Ernest Zarate: "Terrific! Who’d a thunk that a bunch of (seemingly random) dots along with even more names (also seemingly random) would be so fascinating? Thank you, Sarge, for the many hours you devoted to doing this—twice! Truly, the sum is far greater than the parts."
