This is a follow up of a recent post about exploring COVID-19 data with Common Lisp.

A few additions made it into the cl-covid19 repo, and one of them is the ability to generate graph animations using the COVID-19 time series data with gnuplot, which is what this post is about.

The COVID19:PLOT-TIME-SERIES-GLOBAL-ANIMATION function creates an animation of the cases using the global time series data. When creating an animation you need to specify the destination, where the animation will be stored at. The :limit keyword parameter in the example below specifies the number of time series records in ascending order.

CL-USER> (covid19:plot-time-series-global-animation *db-conn*
                                                    #P"/tmp/covid19-global.gif"
                                                    :limit 200)
NIL

The generated animation looks like this.

Another function, which creates animations from time-series data is the COVID19:PLOT-TIME-SERIES-FOR-COUNTRY-ANIMATION. Here’s an example.

CL-USER> (covid19:plot-time-series-for-country-animation *db-conn*
                                                         "Italy"
                                                         #P"/tmp/covid19-it.gif"
                                                         :limit 200)
NIL

The generated animation looks like this.

The :delay, :height, :width and :line-width keyword parameters can be used to further customize the resulting animation.

You can find these and other gnuplot(1) plot templates in the cl-covid19 repo.