The Ice Bucket Challenge

Two years ago I started with a short scope project based on the Ice Bucket Challenge.

In endless autoplaying Facebook videos, people raise up buckets filled with water&ice, announced their philanthropic intentions, and turn the buckets over their heads. Breathless, they would nominate 3 friends, demanding that they do the same upon penalty of a charitable donation to ALS. It was viral. Lots of people uploading videos with challenges.

Alert: Lots of stars challenging between themselves (Mark Zuckerberg challenged Bill Gates, Katy Perry challenged Madonna…)

My first challenge was the data. Lots of stars publishing the challenger via different sources.

My first approach was to represent the challenges with a Node-Link Tree. Obviously was easy to get the derivative challenge of any video, the difficult part was to get the parent node of each challenge (which was the first?). So I change the idea: Chord Diagram.

My first problem with my approach with the diagram, was the data. The #IceBucketChallenge was a borning trend those days, there was no structure data source. So I choose Twitter to collect with a tiny Python script every tweet with the hashtag #IceBucketChallenge.

After collecting some data I started a manual sheet with all stars nominations (with some friend´s help).

With some days of data, I started with a D3js -> Chord Diagram. I wanted to show relations with all comings and goings nominations. That´s why I defined some hover-colors:

Green for XXX nominated YYY. Red for XXX was nominated by YYY.

I used to have a TLD for this projects, but now It´s expired. So please, for the full project go to here.