www.roanoke.com

I hope you're finding the database of gifts to Virginia lawmakers informative, or at least fun. One problem, though, is it doesn't do the math for you. You can't instantly see, for example, who received the most in gifts, or the least.

So I've added a summary graphic to the site called a bubble graph.

The graph is a collection of circles of varying sizes, each representing a lawmaker. The bigger the circle, the higher the total value of gifts the lawmaker received. Click on a circle to get the full name and amount for that lawmaker. Now, hold down the control key and click on several bubbles. In the lower right corner, you'll see it add the totals together for you and give you a percentage of the whole.

So, for example, you can quickly determine that the top seven of 117 lawmakers who accepted gifts account for nearly 25 percent of the value of all the gifts received by everyone combined.

Look for me to begin offering more of these kinds of graphs to compliment the databases we put up. They give you a different way to interact with the data, get it to speak to you in a different way, and also allow me a way to mine the data and show you the results in a friendly format.

You can also generate these kinds of things yourself with your own data using the same web-based utilities I use, like Swivel and Many Eyes.

These are free, though you have to register. They were a curious discovery to me. They give you tools, but they are essentially social networking sites (not too different from facebook or myspace). What you network over is the data you share.

You know, I've always denied being a geek, but the longer I do this job, the less plausible my deniability seems to be. Maybe I should graph that.