The Chaos Ladder

What is this?

A visualization of character appearences on HBO's Game of Thrones TV series.

• Hover over a character to get more information.
• Slide the timeline to see how things have changed over time. You can do this with your mouse or the arrow keys on your keyboard.

What determines if you show a character?

• The character must have appeared in 3 or more episodes. A hand full of memorable characters like Walder Frey and Salladhor Saan are only in 3 episodes, so 3 seemed like a good cut off point.
• The character has to have had at least 1 line of dialog or has to have been in at least one scene where they were prominently featured. There are a few characters like Boros Blount who are in more than 3 episodes, but they're always in the background. Including these types of characters just adds noise to the data.

What rules do you use for determining if and when someone died?

• A character has to absolutely be confirmed as dead in the show or by the producers. If there is any uncertainity (ex: Sandor Clegane), then they will instead be marked as "uncertain", which is shown in yellow on the graph.
• If killed off screen, I base their death marker on when it is said they died (ex: Dagmer).

Why did you make this?

I'm a huge Game of Thrones fan and thought this would be a fun project.

You're wrong about something!

If you think something is incorrect, first double check your idea by visiting the character's wikia page (right click a character in the visualization). Then if you still feel something is amiss, shoot me an email or tweet (@patorjk).

Special Thanks / Credits

I got the idea for the bubble chart from Matthew Daniels's Largest Vocabulary in Hip Hop visualization. After noticing it was based on an example by Amelia Bellamy-Royds, I decided to see if I could create my own bubble chart (and this chart uses Amelia's example as part of its core).

Visualization tooltips utilize Caged's d3-tip library. Tooltip sliderbar trick comes courtesy of setfive.

For the app's core, jQuery, jQuery UI, Bootstrap, and d3.js were utilized. It's seems kind of silly to list everything, but I figured if I was going to list the first few things, I might as well just list everything.

And lastly, data for the chart is based off of information from Wikia's Game of Thrones Wiki