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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

A blog-ish site related to collaboration tools

Daniel Lathrop Wanted to share with all of you my latest installment in my ongoing love affair with Google Fusion Tables, the Dallas publicly-traded companies list. http://newsapps.dallasnews.com/media/dfw-public-companies.html I got the data from the biz desk on Thursday and wrote this little thing using JQuery, JQueryUI and FusionTables pretty quickly. And before everyone gets all "but you could have used [Caspio, TableSetter, Rails, PHP, Ilene, etc.]" on me, I know I could have. But doing this with Fusion Tables let me do all my work on the client side and let me create the user-experience I wanted. Plus, I now have a starting place to do this for any similar Fusion Tables project. For the curious, the Javascript can be found here: http://newsapps.dallasnews.com/media/fusiondmn.pubcompanies.js It's fewer than 150 lines, and more than a quarter of that is my Javascript for for rendering integer/floating point #s in newsroom style (e.g. $4.2 billion). I'm hoping to turn it into a robust tool for deploying searchable data with Fusion Tables and am going to ask my corporate overlords to let me open source it once I've done some refactoring to make it generally applicable. Critiques welcome. -Daniel --------------------------- Daniel Lathrop 206.718.0349 (cell)

An interesting example of yet another "next generation" data analysis and presentation tool. You can see the demos at http://www.lavastorm.com/ Emphasis is on visualizing the data analytic method while doing the analysis.

Data journalism at the Guardian: what is it and how do we do it? Simon Rogers: Our 10 point guide to data journalism and how it's changing Share reddit this Comments (2) Data abstract Data journalism. What is it and how is it changing? Photograph: Alamy Here's an interesting thing: data journalism is becoming part of the establishment. Not in an Oxbridge elite kind of way (although here's some data on that) but in the way it is becoming the industry standard. Two years ago, when we launched the Datablog, all this was new. People still asked if getting stories from data was really journalism and not everyone had seen Adrian Holovaty's riposte. But once you've had MPs expenses and Wikileaks, the startling thing is that no-one asks those questions anymore. Instead, they want to know, "how do we do it?"

Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data, primarily for * detecting and fixing inconsistencies * transforming data from one structure or format to another * connecting names within your data to name registries (databases) Use Google Refine when you need something ... * more powerful than a spreadsheet * more interactive and visual than scripting * more provisional / exploratory / experimental / playful than a database

Sort the signal from the noise Newsbeat tracks the activity of every page you publish in real time, from the top performers to the diamond in the rough. But we don't just show you everything, we show you what's important. Our algorithms forecast the expected path of each story and alert you to unusual activity you might otherwise miss, so you always know what to act on, when it matters most.

The Investigative Dashboard (ID) is a work in progress, that is designed to showcase the potential for collaboration and data-sharing between investigative reporters across the world. The initiative is spearheaded by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, the Romanian Center for Investigative Journalism, the Forum for African Investigative Reporters and the International Center for Journalists, and will expand to include other institutional members of the Global Investigative Journalism Network. The project is coordinated by Paul Cristian Radu (of OCCRP and CRJI) and Justin Arenstein (of FAIR) and was developed while both were in residence at Stanford University as Knight fellows. The John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists made possible the ID by providing access to the know-how of co-fellow journalists and of experts at Stanford University and in Silicon Valley. This first iteration of the ID website shares detailed methodologies, resources, and links for journalists to track money, shareholders, and company ownership across international borders. It also shares video tutorials, and other tools, to help journalists navigate often rapidly evolving data-sources. Future versions of ID will offer more advanced collaborative workspaces, data-archives, and discounted (or, where possible, free) access to expensive or proprietary research services. But, perhaps most importantly, the ID will campaign for investigative centres across the world to collaborate with each other to improve the depth and impact of their reportage.

Site available in Spanish and English Medialab-Prado is a program of the Department of Arts of the City Council of Madrid, aimed at the production, research, and dissemination of digital culture and of the area where art, science, technology, and society intersect. Many workshops for the production of projects, conferences, seminars, encounters, project exhibition, concerts, presentations, etc. take place in its versatile space. All activities are free and open to the general public. Our primary objective is to create a structure where both research and production are processes permeable to user participation. To that end, Medialab-Prado offers: A permanent information, reception, and meeting space attended by cultural mediators. Open calls for the presentation of proposals and participation in the collaborative development of projects. We have several on-going programmes, which are as follows: Interactivos?: creative uses of electronics and programming Inclusiva.net: research and reflections on the network culture Visualizar: data visualization tools and strategies Commons Lab: trans-disciplinary discussion on the Commons AVLAB: audio-visual and sound creation http://medialab-prado.es/article/que_es

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

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.

Searches individuals history of posting on Twitter.

Who can use Twiangulate? Job Seekers Looking for an "in" at a company or trying to learn which tweeps might influence the hiring manager or boss? Or looking for tweeps at target companies or industries in a certain location? Twiangulate has you covered. Journalists Want to find hidden relationships or linchpin players in an industry? Maybe you're looking for sources in a microniche? Or who's most followed at a conference? Twiangulate does it all. Tech Junkies Want to know who your most influential Twitter followers are? Love social network mapping? Want to know when two tweeps start following the same person? Twiangulate!

Mr. People Years ago, while trying to clean up the names of donors in campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission, I hacked together a Perl module - loosely based on the Lingua-EN-NameParse module - to standardize names. One port to Ruby later, I've finally put together a Web front end for it. Try it out below - paste your own data in or try the sample data. To use the people Ruby gem in your own scripts, sudo gem install people, then read the documentation. Suggestions? Send them to mrpeople@ericson.net Allow couples:   Case:  Output:    Paste your names here:

Scott Wilson of http://screen-scraper.com/ has created a useful comparison of web-scraping software and posted it as a public doc on Google Docs: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsaY3Pb1lTh1dERtbWtTN0U3REgtYlNld0stV0NCV1E#gid=0

Download Download your Esri Maps for Office. Esri Maps for Office requires Office 2010 or later. Esri Maps for Office Add-In (x86) 32-bit (70MB) Esri Maps for Office Add-In (x64) 64-bit (70MB) Download the version of Esri Maps for Office that matches the bit version of Microsoft Office 2010 you have installed, not the version of your operating system (OS). If you are not sure, open Excel (or other Office application), click the File tab, and select Help. In the About Microsoft Excel section on the right, the version information states whether the Microsoft Office 2010 installation is 32-bit or 64-bit. Once your download is complete, open Excel.

This looks to be a very valuable tool.

"About story maps Story maps combine intelligent Web maps with Web applications and templates that incorporate text, multimedia, and interactive functions. Story maps inform, educate, entertain, and inspire people about a wide variety of topics."

Meeting in Italy The amount of criminal money washing around the world each year is estimated at $2 trillion, and it affects everything from health and human rights to democracy and national security. Investigative stories have always led to cases involving corrupt activities and criminal conspiracies. But the nature of corrupt and criminal acts is changing quickly with technology and globalization. How can investigative journalists stay on top of techniques to follow and expose crime and corruption in the 21st Century?

Some interesting DropboxAddons here for most operating systems. Note: In addition to the Addons listed here, there are many other applications available at the Dropbox Apps Page.

Hello, this is the Open Flash Chart project. Note: "Open Flash Chart 2" is LGPL. OK, Open Flash Chart 1.x was great and it works like a dream. But I made some little mistakes which over time grew and anyoyed me and made the source code weird. So I decided it was time to re-jigger the code and make it pretty again. The big change is moving the data format to JSON. This has made a big difference and has allowed some pretty cool new features. While I was hacking away at the source code I moved it all to Actionscript 3, and used Adobe Flex to compile it. This means everything is open source. If you want to make changes to the charts all you need is laid out in these instructions. Just because there is a new version doesn't make V 1.x obsolete. You can use both versions at the same time so leave your current working code in V 1.x and make all the new charts using which ever version you find easier to use. Why is V2 better? Well it uses JSON as the file format and this means you can do cool stuff like Grant Slender has: http://code.google.com/p/ofcgwt/ If you like Open Flash Chart and want to see it continue, please help Donate some money :-) Blog about it (promotion takes up about a third of my time) Write a cool library Really. You can make a massive difference to the project! Need help choosing reseller hosting for your charts? Make sure you read reliable web hosting reviews. Why choose Open Flash Chart? This is a little gentle propaganda for the project. Like all opinions, disregard it and make up your own mind. Edge cases such as tooltips encourage user interactivity and data exploration what happens to the tooltip when two points are in the same position? you can re-size the charts missing data save the chart as an image You can highlight or emphasize one (or many) points PC Pro loves open flash chart. Server Side Helper Libraries PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, .NET, Google Web Toolkit and JAVA. Libraries. Next: Che