On Deck:

• 10 Minute Survey Sprint  (some of you will want to add your survey to the list right at the beginning of class and plead for student completion) 
• Visualizing Results

 

 

Today you should be working on your results sections (or Solutions section for the proposal) and your team (or members of it) should come up with:

 

1. A plan for including one persuasive or usable visualization per team-member
2. One visualization of a result that uses one of the tools below (you are of course encouraged to use the free charts generated by Google survey 

 

You don’t need to be a seasoned data scientist or have a degree in graphic design in order to create incredible data visualisations.  It has become a lot simpler to mine your data and interpret your insights in an engaging, attractive, and most importantly easy to understand way.

 

You will want to consider two keys to developing visualizations:

1. The role of Data Types (is it 'categorical', 'ordinal', location, time, ...) which you can review on p. 3 and 4 of this White Paper by IBM
2. The Basic Design principles we introduced at the beginning of the semester: see Jan 15 at the bottom of our wiki page.

 

Below is a list of various different free and premium tools and platforms available which will allow you to communicate data in a variety of different formats, from interactive charts, to infographics, to maps, to word clouds.

 

Not all will be suitable for your particular data set or your audience, but its certainly worth experimenting with a few to seek out the most relevant. 

 

Hopefully you’ll not only learn some new skills and find some new creative tools, but also learn something about your own data.

 

 

Most of the following is drawn from reviews by: 

 Cristopher Ratcliff @ Econsultancy

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1)Many Eyes

Who is using Many Eyes and how

All kinds of people use the community at the Many Eyes website to demonstrate research, make a point, understand trends and patterns or illustrate a theory.

• 

  Researchers

  Climatologists and environmental scientists are using the Many Eyes website to create visualizations about climate change, weather patterns and fuel efficiency. Life scientists are using Many Eyes to develop visualizations about genes, chromosomes and disease patterns.

• 

  Advocacy groups

  Advocacy groups are creating visualizations on the Many Eyes website to support global social services, policy changes and government reforms around the world.

• 

  Journalists

  A wide range of journalists, from economics to sports, are using visualizations they created on the Many Eyes website to understand topics such as the stimulus package and major league baseball salaries.

• 

  Educators and Students

  Educators can produce visualizations on the Many Eyes website that compare college tuition, illustrate student interests and track enrollment patterns.

 

 

 

2) Infogr.am

At Infogr.am you can create interactive, embeddable infographics using more than 30 charts and six themes.

3) Fusion Tables

Google’s Fusion Tables is a data management app that allows you to produce detailed charts, graphs or maps fairly quickly. You can also make them collaborative and use public or your own uploaded data. The Guardian uses this tool if you need an extra recommendation.

 

4) Piktochart

Piktochart has loads of great free and premium templates for infographics, reports, banners and presentations. They’re an attractive and easy to use bunch, in fact we’ve used this tool ourselves.

 

4) dygraphs

dygraphs is an open source JavaScript charting library which allows you to explore and interpret large data sets in a highly customisable way.

 

 

5) Timeline

Created by Simile, Timeline allows you create, simple interactive timelines, which you can scroll or drag horizontally.

 

 

6) Leaflet

Leaflet is an open source Javascript library which allows you to create mobile friendly interactive maps.

 

 

7) D3.JS

D3.JS is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data using HTML, SVG, and CSS.

 

 

8) Tagxedo

Tagxedo is a simple to use word cloud generator. Words are individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within any body of text.

 

9) Easel.ly

Easel.ly is a very simple to use infographic creator with hundreds of templates, or you can just start from a blank slate if you prefer.

 

 

10) Creately

Creately allows real-time diagram collaboration, using more than 50 types of diagrams with thousands of examples and shape libraries available.

 

 

11) Sisense

Sisense allows you to join data from various sources, uncover insights using rich data visualisations and share.

 

 

12) Nuvi

Nuvi is a premium social media visualisation platform that allows you to create real-time visualisations, monitor topics or keywords and build custom reports. 

 

 

13) Bime 

Bime is a premium data and dashboard cloud platform with an eye on stylish cross-device design.

14) Color Brewer

Color Brewer developed by Penn State, is a tool for choosing map colours to ensure distinguishability between specific areas. 

 

 

15) iCharts

iCharts is a cloud-based visual analytics platform, its charts are easily embeddable, shareable and quick to rustle up.

 

 

16) Better World Flux

Using Better World Flux can track the progress of countries using various social, economic and political indicators, and find important trends and patterns.

 

 

17) Visual.ly

Visual.ly has a “push-button approach to infographics and data visualization that doesn’t require a degree in statistics or a stint in art school.”