My the­sis is due pretty soon, so I am cur­rently writ­ing A LOT and make some on–the–go beau­ti­fi­ca­tions to my experiments.

First one is the emerg­ing top­ics his­togram. I fol­lowed my own advice and ver­ti­cally cen­tered the stacked his­togram. Addi­tion­ally, I never liked those sharp edges, so now I do not only “fade out” tags visu­ally, but also fade them in, result­ing in a much more organic pic­ture, and largely improved read­abil­ity of the chart. New color scheme: old tags are cold, freshly intro­duced ones in warm color. This is all very much inspired by the fab­u­lous last.fm charts by Lee Byron — thanks!

new inter­ac­tive ver­sion here

and some pix: