eveneven's comments

You're right, it takes an artistic license with the information and fails any strict requirement of necessity. There are 320k of movers that year though and a transient particle was the only option I saw to display all of them. Screens just don't have the resolution to overlay that much information.

As you point out, aggregation and faceting both solve this, but I really wanted to show all of them. That has more though to do with creating an experience of having seen a certain phenomenon than creating something actionable and clear. It's self indulgant, but I like that. And I agree: static representations with aggregate data would be interesting.

I built this and I'm happy to answer questions if anyone has any. If you like this you might also enjoy this WebGL (Three.js / sockets / workers - Chrome only) animation of Oslo City Planning - http://seeplan.bengler.no/planimator

That's right. Cathode has lots of settings, also one for baud rate. I actually also shot this off the screen, instead of grabbing it right to disk, to give it some texture and depth of field.

There are only two points in time here – registered address 1.1.2006 and 1.1.2007. The first animation sequence is therefore in the order provided by the tax authorities and roughly follows postal codes (starting in Oslo, moving round the coast up to Northern Norway). The particles simply spawn at a fixed rate as we move through the data with the camera attempting to follow the spawn points. Whenever you reach a large city you'll see a concentrated burst as you ascend through its postal codes. Other orderings can be quite informative as well: sorting for age or income in a particular region can display distinct patterns for segments of groups. As was pointed out: the particle animation is too complex to have much salience, but I'm prepared to argue that the slower animations towards the end show clear patterns when comparing different demographies.