A picture of health

A collaborative project from earlier this year that I enjoyed working on was The BMJ's investigation on the sugar industry, and links to UK government advisory panels. For this project I was working with a journalist, Jonathan Gornall, to co-create the graphic. The project started, as so many projects do, with several long tables of data - in this case Freedom of Information act requests, and publicly declared conflict of interest statements from different organisations: I initially began to explore a force-directed node diagram to try and see an overview of these complex links between organisations and individuals. I first tried a d3 layout, by d3noob:  http://bl.ocks.org/d3noob/5141278 https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/56571574/sugar/index.html This version started to reveal important hubs, like the MRC and Susan Jebb, but it wasn't easy to see the detail beyond this. I edited the code, to freeze the dots in place when they were dropped, allowing me more c