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Something that, at least for now, we've dubbed the Video Notebook. Your notes, as well as the sources you've imported, scroll along with the video. Just click on a note and the video jumps to the proper location in the timeline. The lab's lead developer, Charlie Szymanski, is heading up the project. His goal is to create an application to index, search and analyze recorded video by syncing notes and data feeds from sources like Twitter, Storify and live blogs. Essentially, it will allow reporters to save hours of time normally spent wading through video by jumping right to the segments they're looking for. We're hoping a tool like this will be especially helpful to reporters planning to live tweet recorded events, from city council meetings to political stump speeches.

"Abstract Much of the data underlying global poverty and inequality estimates is not in the public domain, but can be accessed in small pieces using the World Bank's PovcalNet online tool. To overcome these limitations and reproduce this database in a format more useful to researchers, we ran approximately 23 million queries of the World Bank's web site, accessing only information that was already in the public domain. This web scraping exercise produced 10,000 points on the cumulative distribution of income or consumption from each of 942 surveys spanning 127 countries over the period 1977 to 2012. This short note describes our methodology, briefly discusses some of the relevant intellectual property issues, and illustrates the kind of calculations that are facilitated by this data set, including growth incidence curves and poverty rates using alternative PPP indices. The full data can be downloaded at www.cgdev.org/povcalnet. "

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.

Again, US-centric, but this might generate some ideas of what could be accomplish in your city/nation. Late yesterday we announced a bunch of new features for Influence Explorer: http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2011/ie-corporate-accountability/ As the blog post explains, you can now find information about a corporation's EPA violations, federal advisory committee memberships, and participation in the rulemaking process -- all in one place. I wanted to highlight that last feature a bit more, though. To my knowledge, this is the first time that the full corpus of public comments submitted to regulations.gov has been available for bulk download and analysis. This isn't a coincidence: regulations.gov is built using technologies that make scraping it unusually difficult. This is unfortunate, since everyone seems to agree that federal rulemakings are gaining in importance -- both because of congressional gridlock that leaves the regulatory process as a second-best option, and because of calls to simplify the regulatory landscape as a pro-growth measure. It's an area where influence is certainly exerted -- rulemakers are obliged to review every comment -- but little attention is paid to who's flooding dockets with comments, and which directions rules are being pushed. It's taken us several months to develop a reliable solution and to obtain past rulemakings, but we now have the data in hand. We plan to do much more with this dataset, and we're hoping that others will want to dig in, too. You can find a link to the bulk download options in the post above -- the full compressed archive of extracted text and metadata is ~16GB, but we've provided options for grabbing individual agencies' or dockets' data. If anyone wants the original documents (PDFs, DOCs, etc) we can talk through how to make that happen, but as they clock in at 1.5TB we'll want to make sure folks know what they're getting into before we spend the time and bandwidth. Finally, note that we currently o

10 ways to screw up your spreadsheet design Recommend +21 Votes 36 Comments 46Share more + By Susan Harkins June 23, 2011, 8:25 AM PDT Takeaway: How you set up a spreadsheet determines its efficiency, usability, and reliability. Avoiding these pitfalls during the design phase will save you a million headaches. Wrong references, missing values, and invalid data aren't the only things that will ruin a spreadsheet. The development process starts before you do a thing, while you're planning the design. These types of mistakes are worse than bugs because you can't troubleshoot them. All you can do is start over. Here are 10 mistakes to avoid early in the process, when you're still in the decision-making phase.

A good list and read down into the comments; additional good tips there.

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

"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."

http://www.zanran.com/ a search engine for data & statistics. Time to open your data, people! #opendata

Charts and graphs are the best ways to represent information and relationship between two interlinked entities. Not only do charts and graphs inform visitors about the trend or relationship you want to show them but also add a visual connection with the visitors. Several online tools are available that help you create comprehensively designed flowcharts and graphs that worth a thousands words. Check them out and let us know what you feel about these tools. http://www.smashingapps.com/2011/08/26/45-free-online-tools-to-create-charts-diagrams-and-flowcharts.html

Be sure to view the video tutorial: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/ii/jigsaw/Jigsaw-tutorial.movhttp://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/ii/jigsaw/Jigsaw-tutorial.mov http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/ii/jigsaw/views.html Jigsaw: Visual Analytics for Exploring and Understanding Document Collections System Views Jigsaw presents the individual reports in a document collection and the entities within those reports through a series of visualizations. We call these visualizations the system views. Below, we illustrate each view provided by the system and briefly describe their characteristics. Click on the individual images to see a larger version of the view. Also, a tutorial video illustrates the different views as well and the interactive behavior for each view can be seen on the video tutorial page. -tj

Also see "The Information Interfaces Group, an HCI research group in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, develops computing technologies that help people take advantage of information to enrich their lives. " http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/ii/