Data Visualization: Unification of Great Britain

Using SankeyMATIC, I created a Sankey diagram visualizing the (simplified) unification of the petty Anglo-Saxon kingdoms into what became England and Scotland.

The limitations of the Sankey diagram format make it difficult to show the constant shifting of ownership of the kingdoms and client/vassal state status. The format also does not accurately represent kingdoms over time, as the minor kingdoms did not all get incorporated at the same time. Ultimately all English kingdoms were incorporated into Wessex prior to English unification, but this is also difficult to show with the Sankey format.

A possible solution would be to create unique node-names for each shift in kingdom ownership, deselect the node label option, then manually add labels on to the diagram using another program. I could potentially edit the tool’s source code, but ughhhh JavaScript.

This might ultimately be something I bring into Illustrator to create a more detailed flow chart that includes all the changes in kingdom ownership as well as merging nodes along.a timeline to make the chart as accurate as possible.