Mee-Search
Four columns, left to right: where people came from, who they became, what noodle they made, what ended up in the bowl. The moving dots are the flow itself. Hover any band to follow one thread the whole way across — and watch what happens when you follow the yellow noodle.
Band thickness is how many things travel that route. Particle colour is inherited from the community the thread passes through, so a single dish can receive dots of several colours — which is the entire point of the dataset.
Making the shared infrastructure visible. Pick Yellow alkaline wheat noodle from the thread selector: it fans out to Hokkien, Cantonese, Malay and Tamil-Muslim dishes alike, because it was made in Chinese factories and sold to everybody. Then pick Salted wheat thread and watch it stay in one corner.
A static Sankey reads as a supply chain. Moving particles read as migration, which is what this actually is — and the speed control exists because the honest speed is “over two centuries”.