An interactive visualization of the relationships between members of Portuguese governments and companies for the period of 1975 to 2013. Data is approached as an ecosystem, where each set of interdependent relations are regulated by physical conditions—each politician has a sequence of companies to visit, chasing them and jumping between them, in order to restart the sequence each time it is completed.
See the visualization in http://pmcruz.com/eco.
The data was collected from a study of politics and businesses done for the documentary “Donos de Portugal” which covers the relations of ministers and secretaries of state of Portuguese governments with companies, roughly from 1975 to 2010. This study was complemented with our own research of their positions in companies until 2013.
In addition, other politicians and companies were added from an “Exploratory study about political connections of stock companies in Portugal”, and another hand full that we deemed relevant but always with high governmental positions (ministers, secretaries of state and prime-ministers).
It should also be noticed that the gathered information was always included from public sources, such as companies' governing bodies available online, companies' public reports, news from the online press and public résumés. This resulted in more than 130 gathered politicians and more than 350 companies that are still being added to the system as we conclude our research. Although this data is only a sample of the real dimension of traffic between companies and governments in Portugal, it is indeed highly illustrative of the subject.
The data is available in the JSON format in js/worms/data/worms_12jan.json. Companies are created through this file by using their name as the identifier. An additional data file js/worms/data/grouping.json enables to attribute long/additional names to the companies and to group several companies into one by using the “related” attribute. Grouping can be used to merge several companies into big corporate groups.
My name is Pedro Miguel Cruz, I like to shape things, and this is the form that I gave to this subject. A big thank you to Cátia Costa, member of the Computational Design and Visualization Lab at University of Coimbra, that researched, ratified and typed almost 9000 lines of data, with rigor and perseverance. A big shout-out to my supervisor Penousal Machado without whom this work wouldn't be possible as it is. A word of appreciation for the wisdom to Alexandre Matos and João Bicker.
My main inspiration for the implementation of this work and its core components are the delicious sketch.js and Coffee Physics from Justin Windle. Others follow that should have my most respectable acknowledgment, since they make life so much easier: has.js, devbridge/jQuery-Autocomplete, nanoScroller.js, harthur/color.js, sole/tween.js, Hyphenator.js.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
