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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.

What is Meograph? Meograph helps easily create, watch, and share interactive stories. Our first product combines maps, timeline, links, and multimedia to tell stories in context of where and when. Authoring is structured into a few simple prompts on an intuitive interface. Viewers get a new form of media that they can watch in two minutes or explore for an hour. Sharing is easy: the two most viral types of media are videos and infographics ... Meograph is both.

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 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."

Highcharts Highcharts is a charting library written in pure JavaScript, offering intuitive, interactive charts to your web site or web application. Highcharts currently supports line, spline, area, areaspline, column, bar, pie, scatter, angular gauges, arearange, areasplinerange, columnrange and polar chart types.

Outstanding example of infoviz Gay rights in the US, state by state Gay rights laws in America have evolved to allow - but in some cases ban - rights for gay, lesbian and transgender people on a range of issues, including marriage, hospital visitation, adoption, housing, employment and school bullying. The handling of gay rights issues vary by state and follow trends by region

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.

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:

Solving the Pie Chris Gemignani December 14, 2006 By: Chris Gemignani Last week I challenged you to reproduce this alternative to pie charts in Excel. I promised a screencast to show how it's done. http://juiceanalytics.com/writing/2006/12/square-pie-screencast/ Square Pie Eighteen people answered the call with nearly three dozen different solutions. Click here to watch the screencast showing how to accomplish the two most popular solutions; filling cells with conditional formatting and pushing the column chart to extremes. If you want to look at the source,Clint Ivy produced an excellent version of the cell filling approach.

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

By Dan Nguyen Reactions to Osama bin Laden's death: Female and non-U.S. residents more ambivalent. Via the NYT Reactions Matrix By Dan Nguyen | Published: May 9, 2011 This (totally not-double-checked) analysis is a riff off of the excellent New York Times visualization (The Death of a Terrorist: A Turning Point?) of how people reacted to Osama bin Laden's death. In the days following the news, the Times asked online readers to not only write their thoughts on bin Laden's killing, but put a mark on a scatterplot graph that best described their reaction. The Times used the data to show the continuum of reactions from everyone who participated. I wanted to see how reactions differed across geographical location and gender. Includes details of his methodology (and a bit on that of the original NYT graphic)

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

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

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.

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

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

Shape to Fusion Hi. This website lets you import a shapefile to Google Fusion Tables. This blog post has some details on how it was built. (http://porcupinealley.com/2010/dec/20/shape-escape/) To continue, you will need to authorize this site to access your Fusion Tables data on your behalf. Site by Josh Livni. Source code available at http://code.google.com/p/shpescape/

Beautiful but Terrible Pyramids: Tableau Edition by Jorge Camoes on July 12, 2011 Well, here is my first chart in Tableau, finally! After publishing my experiments with population pyramids (using Excel), I thought I could try Tableau Public with the same dataset from the US Census Bureau. Here is the result. I never really played before with Tableau Public and it took my less than an hour to upload the data and make this chart, without reading a manual or watching a tutorial (changing line colors was the hard part). It says a lot about its usability. http://www.excelcharts.com/blog/beautiful-but-terrible-pyramids-tableau-edition/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+JCCharts+%28Excel+Charts+Blog%29

Select your favorite nation. Note how this could be used to illustrate population changes for a single nation over time or nation-to-nation comparisons.

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