The Waiting Game is a Data Representation of voter waiting times, by state, during the US 2012 presidential election.

Using twitter's streaming API, tweets were collected containing the term "hours to vote" to find the average waiting time for each state where data was available. The framework of the US flag was chosen not only for it's power as a visual icon, but also for a metaphor of navigating freedom - in both our civil rights as voters, but also quite literally in our visualization.

An animation of George Washington navigates an abstracted flag in real time. In instances where voters cited spending 3 hours at the polls, the animation takes that long to run. The blue portion of our flag serves as an unconventional menu, where the user is able to select a state to visualize. After a state is selected, tweets from that state are displayed in that area. When George reaches the end of The Waiting Game, an unceremonious '+1' pops up on screen.

The Waiting Game was created with R and Processing 2.03b at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) in the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU in collaboration with Alessandra Villaamil, Deqing Sun, and Luis Daniel. The code can be found on github.