With the inspiration of Project 1, I decided to focus on the five categories of publications related to mental health problems, which are Anxiety, Stress, Panic, Depression, and Mental Health.
I selected the number of checkouts in these categories from 2006 to 2023, and also with the total number of checkouts, I calculated the percentage of these categories, which could reveal the trend over time more clearly.

I got this inspiration when I was listening to songs and thought it would be interesting if I could visualize the data in a sphere coordinate, combine different categories into one sphere, and compare them over time.

I have gathered checkout records from 2006 to 2023 and specifically identified those related to five different categories. I organized the data by month and calculated the percentage of checkouts that fall under the different five categories. This provides insights into the proportion of these checkouts concerning the overall checkout activity over these years.

To make the result more like a sound wave, I’ve tried to use vertex() as well as curveVertex(). First, connect the points over the year and month. Then I also tried to connect every three adjacent vertexes to form and fill the surface, but it wasn’t what I wanted, so I stayed at the first way. Then due to two special points with extremely high values, I let all the 0 percentages stay at 0, used log() to change the range of these data, set the upper and lower limits, and then used map() to assign the percentage value to the minimum and maximum radius of the sphere.

Initially, five balls represent the percentage of checkout from five different categories.


Then we can choose to draw any of these category balls separately or draw all the data in one sphere.


We can also choose to make the points or the axis of year and month disappear.


We can click different categories to highlight them

All work is developed within Processing
Source Code + Data