ENTRIES TAGGED "data visualization"
On becoming a code artist
An interview with Scott Murray, author of Interactive Data Visualization for the Web
Scott Murray, a code artist, has written Interactive Data Visualization for the Web for nonprogrammers. In this interview, Scott provides some insights on what inspired him to write an introduction to D3 for artists, graphic designers, journalists, researchers, or anyone that is looking to begin programming data visualizations.
What inspired you to become a code artist?
Scott Murray
Scott Murray: I had designed websites for a long time, but several years ago was frustrated by web browsers’ limitations. I went back to school for an MFA to force myself to explore interactive options beyond the browser. At MassArt, I was introduced to Processing, the free programming environment for artists. It opened up a whole new world of programmatic means of manipulating and interacting with data — and not just traditional data sets, but also live “data” such as from input devices or dynamic APIs, which can then be used to manipulate the output. Processing let me start prototyping ideas immediately; it is so enjoyable to be able to build something that really works, rather than designing static mockups first, and then hopefully, one day, invest the time to program it. Something about that shift in process is both empowering and liberating — being able to express your ideas quickly in code, and watch the system carry out your instructions, ultimately creating images and experiences that are beyond what you had originally envisioned.
Visualization of the Week: Real-time Wikipedia edits
The Wikipedia Recent Changes Map visualizes Wikipedia edits around the world in real-time.
Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi have put together an addictive visualization of real-time edits on Wikipedia, mapped across the world. Every time an edit is made, the user’s location and the entry they edited are listed along with a corresponding dot on the map.
Click here for the full visualization.
Read more…
11 Essential Features that Visual Analysis Tools Should Have
Visual analysis tools are adding advanced analytics for big data
After recently playing with SAS Visual Analytics, I’ve been thinking about tools for visual analysis. By visual analysis I mean the type of analysis most recently popularized by Tableau, QlikView, and Spotfire: you encounter a data set for the first time, conduct exploratory data analysis, with the goal of discovering interesting patterns and associations. Having used a few visualization tools myself, here’s a quick wish-list of features (culled from tools I’ve used or have seen in action).
Requires little (to no) coding
The viz tools I currently use require programming skills. Coding means switching back-and-forth between a visual (chart) and text (code). It’s nice1 to be able to customize charts via code, but when you’re in the exploratory phase not having to think about code syntax is ideal. Plus GUI-based tools allow you to collaborate with many more users.
Fruit or mobile device: learning concepts through connections
Preview of insights shared at upcoming session at Strata Santa Clara
Social media gives us the power to share content and engage with a wide range of internet users. As a person or brand, we are often concerned with who we are talking to and how we can better serve our viewers. Traditional demographics such as ‘female’ and ‘25-30’ are no longer sufficient in this arena. For example, Google is having a hard time getting gender and age correct for ad preferences. It is more interesting to observe what content is consumed and how attention changes over time.
Bitly, which is used to shorten and share links, can offer insight into this space. This means the data has an unprecedented view into what people are sharing and has a holistic view of what users are concerned about on the internet.
We use their data to look into how we can define the audience of different content. The simplest example of this is: given a group of users that click on “oreilly.com”, what other websites do they engage with. We now have what bitly calls a co-click graph. Domains are represented as nodes while edges between nodes represent the number of people that have clicked on each domain. A co-click graph can be made to represent any number of attributes, but for now we are going to remain interested in topics and keywords.
Facet: The recursive approach to visualization
Sneak peek at my upcoming session at the Strata Conference in Santa Clara
Visualizing data and extracting it from its data store are two activities that go hand in hand. Typically, when you try to use a data visualization toolkit such as Raphael, Protovis or D3 to create a non-trivial visualization, you spend a significant portion of your time writing code to extract the data. The process may involve querying an external database then transforming the resulting data to the correct structure for your visualization.
In his paper introducing plyr, a data manipulation toolkit for R, Hadley Wickham describes a framework, split-apply-combine, for expressing common data operations. The idea is that most data operations can be seen as splitting the data into a series of buckets, applying some aggregation to each bucket to get an aggregate and then combining the results by sorting and limiting. Wickham argues that most data query languages already rely on an equivalent framework whether explicitly or implicitly.
Exploring web standards for high data density visualizations
A sneak peek at an upcoming visualization session from the 2013 Strata Conference in Santa Clara, Calif.
Strata Editor’s Note: Over the next few weeks, the Strata Community Site will be providing sneak peeks of upcoming sessions at the Strata Conference in Santa Clara. Nicolas’ sneak peek is the first in this series.
Last year was a great year for data visualization at Twitter. Our Analytics team expanded and created a dedicated data visualization team, and some of our projects were released publicly with great feedback.
Our first public interactive of 2012 was a fun way to expose how the Eurocup was experienced at Twitter. You can see in this organic visualization how people cheered for their teams during each match, and how the tension and volume of tweets increased towards the finals.
Visualization of the Week: Visualizing D.C. homicides
The Washington Post developed an interactive map using data from area homicides from 2000 through 2011.
Residents in Washington D.C., or citizens considering a move to D.C., have a new tool to assess the city’s homicide rate. As part of a 15-month investigative study, The Washington Post has created an interactive map of the homicides in D.C. from 2000 through 2011. The interactive tool lets users drill down into the information by demographic, motive and manner of murder, for instance — all of which can also be isolated by neighborhood or by individual homicide.
Profile of the Data Journalist: The Storyteller and The Teacher
Sarah Cohen and Anthony DeBarros teach and show how to use data in the service of storytelling.
To learn more about the people who are redefining the practice computer-assisted reporting, in some cases, building the newsroom stack for the 21st century, Radar conducted a series of email interviews with data journalists during the 2012 NICAR Conference. "News apps — when done right — can make large amounts of data easily understood and relevant to each person using them," said Anthony DeBarros.
Profile of the Data Journalist: The Hacks Hacker
Chrys Wu is helping other journalists learn how to practice data journalism at "Hacks and Hackers."
To learn more about the people who are redefining the practice computer-assisted reporting, in some cases, building the newsroom stack for the 21st century, Radar conducted a series of email interviews with data journalists during the 2012 NICAR Conference. "Data journalism and news apps create the lens that shows people the big picture they couldn't see but maybe had a hunch about otherwise," says Chrys Wu.
Profile of the Data Journalist: The Daily Visualizer
Matt Stiles oversees data journalism on NPR's State Impact project.
To learn more about the people who are redefining the practice computer-assisted reporting, in some cases, building the newsroom stack for the 21st century, Radar conducted a series of email interviews with data journalists during the 2012 NICAR Conference.
