✨ Excited to launch:✨

~ WAVES OF INTEREST ~
Tracing Google Search Interest
in US Election Years

https://t.co/iF8VwZTgS7

w/ @recifs @destrysibley @googlenewsinit @albertocairo @smfrogers

🧵👇

When @smfrogers and @albertocairo reached out to do a project for the US elections, based on Google Trends data, my immediate thought was to make it *long-term*.

Google Trends covers 17 years of data by now!

What an opportunity to investigate how past US election years were different from this one, and which attention cycles can we observe within election years.

How did the topic landscape evolve?

And how has the pace of attention shifts changed?

After lots of analysis and experimentation, we put together the site as follows:

Opening with a smooth wavy line chart animation — an ambient introduction to the theme of waves, and trends — we dive right into the first central question:

"Which political topics trend in election years in general? And when?"

We show both a list of top rising topics in election years, as well as a detailed chart of how their search interest values unfolded over the years.