I've nearly finished Webscavator, my visualisation application for the forensic analysis of user web history! The next series of blog posts will describe some of the visualisations I've used and how to code them. They are all written in server-side Python and client-side Javascript using jQuery. First on the list are heatmaps. These visualisations show the data using colour. For example low values go blue and higher values go red to visualise a temperature scale. A couple of examples can be found at heatmapapi.com, Google Visualization API and GraphUp. I found the Google Visualization API too limiting to work with for this particular visualisation, and GraphUp is not free or open source, so I made my own, described below.

Read full article