1. A Tinkerer’s Toolbox:
Data Driven Journalism
Tony Hirst
Dept of Communication and Systems
The Open University
Visiting Senior Research Fellow, University of Lincoln
20. Explanatory visualization
Data visualizations that are used to
transmit information or a point of
view from the designer to the
reader. Explanatory visualizations
typically have a specific “story” or
information that they are intended
to transmit.
Exploratory visualization
Data visualizations that are used by
the designer for self-informative
purposes to discover patterns,
trends, or sub-problems in a
dataset. Exploratory visualizations
typically don’t have an already-
known story.
60. Google
Yahoo! Pipe
Wikipedia HTML Spreadsheet CSV
Import CSV
=importHTML
Embedded
<embed> Google Map KML
object
61.
62.
63. Find the data…
Google
Yahoo! Pipe
Wikipedia HTML Spreadsheet CSV
Import CSV
=importHTML
Embedded
<embed> Google Map KML
object
64. Get the data as data…
Google
Yahoo! Pipe
Wikipedia HTML Spreadsheet CSV
Import CSV
=importHTML
Embedded
<embed> Google Map KML
object
65. Transform the data…
Google
Yahoo! Pipe
Wikipedia HTML Spreadsheet CSV
Import CSV
=importHTML
Embedded
<embed> Google Map KML
object
66. Enrich the data and transform again…
Google
Yahoo! Pipe
Wikipedia HTML Spreadsheet CSV
Import CSV
=importHTML
Embedded
<embed> Google Map KML
object
67. Display the data…
Google
Yahoo! Pipe
Wikipedia HTML Spreadsheet CSV
Import CSV
=importHTML
Embedded
<embed> Google Map KML
object
68. Publish the displayed data…
Google
Yahoo! Pipe
Wikipedia HTML Spreadsheet CSV
Import CSV
=importHTML
Embedded
<embed> Google Map KML
object
96. Electrical Safety 101
We get a lot of stuff from
Asia, so it all comes with
funny plugs, travelling just
adds to the fun.
Left to right top to bottom we
have:
Singapore wall socket UK
Adapter UK -> NZ/AU
Double adapter NZ/AU
My cell charger NZ/AU
Adapter NZ/AU -> everything
Andreas cell charger Euro
Camera charger US
tolomea
Through the provision of an API on top of the aggregated local council data, OpenlyLocal can also be treated as a database in its own right. In the example shown here, committee membership is displayed via a treemap showing party affiliations of committee members. (Hovering over a particular grouping displays a list of names of council members on that committee from that party political grouping.) Whilst it would be a major task to take data from every council website in a variety of formats in order to generate similar views for other councils, the work done by OpenlyLocal in aggregating this data and then republishing it via a single API in a single format means that the treemap view can be applied to each council whose data is stored in OpenlyLocal.In passing, it is also worth mentioning how the use of visualisations can be helpful in cleaning data or identifying possible errors in it. In the above example, we see that party affiliations for councillors on the Isle of Wight Council are declared as both Liberal Democrat and and Liberal Democrat Group.
The top, blue strip shows the gear (1 to 7); the green strip shows the throttle pedal depression (0-100%), and the red strip shows the brake (0-100%). The light blue strip is a composite of the previous three strips. The whiter the pixel, the closer it is to 100% throttle in 7th gear with no braking.The bottom two traces show the longitudinal and lateral g-force respectively. For the longitudinal trace, red shows braking – being forced into the steering wheel; green shows acceleration – being forced back into your seat. You’ll see the greatest g-force under braking occurs when the brakes are slapped full on… (the red bits in the third and fifth traces line up). For the latitudinal g-force, the red shows the driving being flung to the left (i.e. right hand corner), the green shows them being pushed out to the right.
Analogsynth – pretty much ultimate freedom to linlk audio processing effects modules together. Simplified by having a common plug.
Some scene setting about what I mean by “flow”…
Suppose we have a table of numerical data associated with placenames on something like Wikipedia. How do we knock up a quick map view of the data?
UK city population search onwikipedia
This can all be a bit flakey – a bit like balancing stones… But It can also be surprisingly stable (for a time at least!)
Here we see the result of pulling data into a Google Spreadsheet from a CSV file published at a particular web address. We now have the ability to run the full range of spreadsheet tools over the data – data which is being pulled in from the datastore, remember.(A similar functionality presumably exists in Microsoft Excel?)
Emergent Social Positioning: origins: 1.5 degree egonet (how followers follow each other, how hashtaggers follow each other)- projection maps from followers to folk they commonly follow;-- projection maps from hashtaggers to folk they commonly follow- projection maps from friends to folk who commonly follow them
Lots of the time, things don’t quite fit: the import format for one tool does not match up with the export formats of another… so sometimes we need an adapter. (Cf. also the notion of impedance mismatch.)
