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Goals and Topics Our goal with this workshop is to bring together data storytellers from diverse disciplines and continue the conversation of how these different fields utilize each other's techniques and articulate principles for telling data narratives. Our target participants are researchers, journalists, bloggers, and others who seek to understand how visualizations support narrative, stories, and other communicative goals. Participants may be designers of such visualizations or designers of tools that support the creation of narrative visualizations. Visualizations that serve as a "community mirror" and thus create opportunities for discussion, reflection and sharing within a social network are also suitable topics. While we are inspired by many visualizations that display personal histories and storylines, our focus is on visualization situated in storytelling contexts, not necessarily visualizations of stories. Specific topics of interest may include, but are not limited to: Media and genres Embedding visualizations in social media to tell stories Multimodal storytelling with visualization (e.g. narrated or acted visualization, such as Rosling's Gapminder presentations) Non-traditional narrative - games and other procedural narratives incorporating data Visualization in (data)journalism - how news stories and visualization can complement each other Visualizations that support specific types of stories: Personal stories ("Here's a history of my cancer treatment") Community and collaboration stories ("How has our Facebook group changed over the past year?") Public data sets and narrative ("What is your Senator doing with your taxes?") Fictional, semi-fictional, and non-fiction stories

Data Visualization Platform, Weave, Now Open Source Logo Open Source Initiative Image via Wikipedia Civic Commons, Contributors (Karl Fogel, Author) With more and more civic data becoming available and accessible, the challenge grows for policy makers and citizens to leverage that data for better decision-making. It is often difficult to understand context and perform analysis. "Weave", however, helps. A web-based data visualization tool, Weave enables users to explore, analyze, visualize and disseminate data online from any location at any time. We saw tremendous potential in the platform and have been helping open-source the software, advising on community engagement strategy and licensing. This week, we were excited to see the soft launch of the Weave 1.0 Beta, which went open-source on Wednesday, June 15. Weave is the result of a broad partnership: it was developed by the Institute for Visualization and Perception Research at the University of Massachussetts Lowell, with support from the Open Indicators Consortium, which is made up of over ten municipal, regional, and state member organizations. This consortium will probably expand now that Weave is open source, leading hopefully to greater collaboration, more development, and further innovation on this important platform. Early-adopter data geeks should give it a spin. One of Weave's key features is high-speed interactivity and responsiveness, which is somewhat unusual in web-based visualization software; try out the demo sites or watch the video below. Our congratulations and thanks to the Weave team! As city management is increasingly data-driven, so data analysis and visualization tools will continue to be an important part of every city manager's toolkit. We are excited to see this evolving toolkit enter the civic commons. http://govinthelab.com/data-visualization-platform-weave-now-open-source

ntroduction to Infographics and Data Visualization: Knight Center's first Massive Open Online Course "Bookmark Registration is now open for the Knight Center's first MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). The course will formally begin on Sunday, October 28, 2012 through Saturday, December 8, 2012. Below are course details and how to register. The introductory area of the course is now available to enrolled students. The introductory area includes access to the course syllabus and the introductory overview video for the course. Course Dates: Sunday, October 28, 2012 - Saturday, December 8, 2012 Course Language: English Instructor: Alberto Cairo Course Objectives: * How to analyze and critique infographics and visualizations in newspapers, books, TV, etc., and how to propose alternatives that would improve them. * How to plan for data-based storytelling through charts, maps, and diagrams. * How to design infographics and visualizations that are not just attractive but, above all, informative, deep, and accurate. * The rules of graphic design and of interaction design, applied to infographics and visualizations. * Optional: How to use Adobe Illustrator to create infographics.

ITA Software is proud to introduce Needlebase™, a revolutionary platform for acquiring, integrating, cleansing, analyzing and publishing data on the web. Using Needlebase through a web browser, without programmers or DBAs, your data team can easily: acquire data from multiple sources: A simple tagging process quickly imports structured data from complex websites, XML feeds, and spreadsheets into a unified database of your design. merge, deduplicate and cleanse: Needlebase uses intelligent semantics to help you find and merge variant forms of the same record. Your merges, edits and deletions persist even after the original data is refreshed from its source. build and publish custom data views: Use Needlebase's visual UI and powerful query language to configure exactly your desired view of the data, whether as a list, table, grid, or map. Then, with one click, publish the data for others to see, or export a feed of the clean data to your own local database. Needlebase dramatically reduces the time, cost, and expertise needed to build and maintain comprehensive databases of practically anything. Read on to learn more about Needlebase's capabilities and our early adopters' success stories, or watch our tutorial videos. Then sign up to get started! http://needlebase.com

"Data docs is a video platform that allows filmmakers and journalist to combine elements from the web, such as interactive graphics, text and scraped information, with linear media, such as video and audio. Having worked in video both in long-form documentary and web video, we understand the power of visual media. Videos are powerful vehicles that we can use to tell personable or explanatory immersive stories. But one of the drawbacks of video as a medium is that they are finished products, which, after they have been published, become outdated fairly quickly. Advances in technology and data bases has allowed for data to be more flexible than video. Data visualizations and interactive infographics, for instance, can be up-to-date at any moment in time if they are hooked up to the right data bases. Think of charts of stock markets that updated every millisecond because APIs or other technological mechanisms feed them live data. We wanted to combine those two worlds - the world of immersive video storyelling and that of live and constantly updated data. This is why we created Data Docs. Through the Data Docs code library filmmakers and developers can 'hook up' their video to live data and other up-to-date information from the web. The library also allows you to integrate your own interactives with specific fonts and styles into your video. It enables you to project HTML, CSS and JavaScript-based graphics on your video. This helps you make videos that will never be out of date or, in other words, to make videos that are evergreen."

Visualization contests around the corner May 25, 2011 to Contests | Comments (3) The best way to learn how to visualize data is to grab a dataset and see what you can do with it. You can read as many tips and tricks as you want, but you're not going to get any better until you actually try. Contests are a fun way to do this. Participate So here are a handful of visualization contests to get your hands dirty. Hey you might even win a couple of thousand dollars. Not that money matters to you, because as well all know, learning is your reward. Hacking Education - A contest for developers and data crunchers. DonorsChoose.org has inspired $80 million in giving from 400,000 donors, helping 165,000 teachers at 43,000 schools, and the donation site has opened up this data. Can do you do something with it? Deadline: June 30, 2011. Data In Sight - A hands-on competition in San Francisco's SoMa district with surprise data sources. Some talks, lunch, dinner, and a 24-hour hackathon. Event date: June 24, 2011 (better to register your team early). Tableau Interactive Viz Contest - This one is coming up the quickest, but is the most straightforward. Plus, you get a t-shirt just for entering. Grab some business, finance, or real estate data and go to town with Tableau Public. Deadline: June 3, 2011.

Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. From basic charts and graphs to complex interactive graphics, the toolkit supports data management, visual encoding, animation, and interaction techniques. Even better, flare features a modular design that lets developers create customized visualization techniques without having to reinvent the wheel. View the demos and sample applications to see a few of the visualizations that flare makes it easy to build. To begin making your own visualizations, download flare and work through the tutorial. You should also get familiar with the API documentation. Need more help? Visit the help forum (you'll need a SourceForge login to post). Flare is open-source software released under a BSD license, meaning it can be freely deployed and modified (and even sold for $$). Flare's design was adapted from its predecessor prefuse, a visualization toolkit for Java.

Visual.ly - a new tool to create data visualisations July 28th, 2011Posted by Sarah Marshall in Data, Design and graphics, Handy tools and technology, Multimedia Visual.ly is a new platform to allow you to explore and share data visualisations. According to the video below, it is two things: a platform to upload and promote your own visualisations and a space to connect "dataviz pros", advertisers and publishers. Visual.ly has teamed up with media partners, including GigaOM, Mashable and the Atlantic, who each have a profile showcasing their data visualisations. You will soon be able to create your own "beautiful visualisations in minutes" and will "instantly apply the graphics genius of the world's top information designers to your designs", the site promises. Plug and play, then grab and go with our push-button approach to visualisation creation. The sample images are impressive, but journalists will have to wait until they can upload their own data.

Data Without Borders seeks to match non-profits in need of data analysis with freelance and pro bono data scientists who can work to help them with data collection, analysis, visualization, or decision support.

A good resource to extend the intellectual power and reach of your newsroom.

I came back from last year's National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR) conference with 22 free tools for data visualization and analysis -- most of which are still popular and worth a look. At this year's conference, I learned about other free (or at least inexpensive) tools for data analysis and presentation. Want to see all the tools from last year and 2012? For quick reference, check out our chart listing all 30 free data visualization and analysis tools. Like that previous group of 22 tools, these range from easy enough for a beginner (i.e., anyone who can do rudimentary spreadsheet data entry) to expert (requiring hands-on coding). Here are eight of the best:

They Rule Overview They Rule aims to provide a glimpse of some of the relationships of the US ruling class. It takes as its focus the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors. Some individuals sit on 5, 6 or 7 of the top 1000 companies. It allows users to browse through these interlocking directories and run searches on the boards and companies. A user can save a map of connections complete with their annotations and email links to these maps to others. They Rule is a starting point for research about these powerful individuals and corporations. Context A few companies control much of the economy and oligopolies exert control in nearly every sector of the economy. The people who head up these companies swap on and off the boards from one company to another, and in and out of government committees and positions. These people run the most powerful institutions on the planet, and we have almost no say in who they are. This is not a conspiracy, they are proud to rule, yet these connections of power are not always visible to the public eye. Karl Marx once called this ruling class a 'band of hostile brothers.' They stand against each other in the competitve struggle for the continued accumulation of their capital, but they stand together as a family supporting their interests in perpetuating the profit system as whole. Protecting this system can require the cover of a 'legitimate' force - and this is the role that is played by the state. An understanding of this system can not be gleaned from looking at the inter-personal relations of this class alone, but rather how they stand in relation to other classes in society. Hopefully They Rule will raise larger questions about the structure of our society and in whose benefit it is run. The Data We do not claim that this data is 100% accurate at all times. Corporate directors have a habit of dying, quitting boards, joining new ones and most frustratingly passing on their name

I think this data must be very useful to the people in Occupy Wall Street

Welcome to Data Science Central! Data Science Central is the industry's one stop resource for big data practitioners. From Analytics to Data Integration to Visualization, Data Science Central (DSC) provides a true community experience through social interaction, peer to peer technical support, the latest in technology, tools and trends --and even job opportunities. We look forward to hearing your feedback as we grow this community of professionals in our exciting industry during times of dramatic change.

Welcome to the Improving data visualisation for the public sector project Good data visualisation can help users explore and understand the patterns and trends in data, and also communicate that understanding to others to help them make robust decisions based on the data being presented. This site supports public sector researchers improve the way that they visualise data, by providing good practice examples and case studies, practical and step-by-step guides on how to visualise data, and links to more detailed resources. http://www.improving-visualisation.org

A taxonomy of tools that support the fluent and flexible use of visualizations Jeffrey Heer, Stanford University Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland, College Park The increasing scale and availability of digital data provides an extraordinary resource for informing public policy, scientific discovery, business strategy, and even our personal lives. To get the most out of such data, however, users must be able to make sense of it: to pursue questions, uncover patterns of interest, and identify (and potentially correct) errors. In concert with data-management systems and statistical algorithms, analysis requires contextualized human judgments regarding the domain-specific significance of the clusters, trends, and outliers discovered in data.

Perception: Gestalt Laws Home → Data visualization for Excel users → Perception: Gestalt Laws Every chart starts with a table. We transcribe this table into a visual representation of distances between data points: the "origin chart". That's when our "eye-brain system" starts making assumptions. It assumes that data points are somewhat related, even if they are not:

Interactive charts add heft to your data stories Posted Feb. 16 - 10 a.m. in MJ Bear Fellows, Resources by Lucas Timmons Filed under data Data journalism can be very compelling. Stitched with a good narrative, it can tell one amazing story. But we can do better than that. We can also visualize the data and provide a great package. With that in mind, here are three free options for creating animated and interactive charts.

Matthew Ericson « Illustrator MultiExporter script: Now with JPG and EPS When Maps Shouldn't Be Maps View full interactive map on nytimes.com » Often, when you get data that is organized by geography - say, for example, food stamp rates in every county, high school graduation rates in every state, election results in every House district, racial and ethnic distributions in each census tract - the impulse is since the data CAN be mapped, the best way to present the data MUST be a map. You plug the data into ArcView, join it up with a shapefile, export to Illustrator, clean up the styles and voilà! Instant graphic ready to be published. And in many cases, that's the right call.

Jonathan Stray of the Associated Press on investigating thousands (or millions) of documents by visualizing clusters. Presentation is from February 2011 at the National Institute of Computer-Assisted Reporting. Visualizations built with multidimensional scaling algorithm Glimmer.

How to make searchable, Web-based Google charts Michelle Minkoff by Michelle Minkoff Published June 3, 2011 12:01 am Updated June 2, 2011 10:22 pm A lot of data visualization requires the technical expertise of a programmer and skills that take time and resources to develop. A rise in free tools, however, has made it easier to make interactive graphs in charts, whether you're a designer, developer, Web producer or hobbyist. The Google Visualization API, for instance, gives you options without making the work too complicated. I've created a tutorial below to help you make simple, Web-based Google charts. (You can click on any of the screenshots to go to a larger version.) In the first example, we'll craft an interactive bar chart that compares the numbers of tornado-related deaths in the United States throughout the past four years. We'll use data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which can be found here. (You can download a cleaned version of this data here, formatted as a comma-delimited file, CSV.) http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/newsgathering-storytelling/126595/how-to-make-simple-web-based-google-charts

kdmc data visualization tutorials KDMC produces a wealth of digital media tutorials to support our training sessions and classes. While the focus of some tutorials is on technology and journalism, most are general enough to be of use to anyone.

A very good collection of dataviz tips and tools