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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

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/

Understanding how to clean data is an important skill every reporter needs. Demographic, financial and other data is available on a city, county, state and national level in the United States. But understanding how to take a large data file and distill it into a usable form can be daunting. In this tutorial, you'll learn how spreadsheets work, basic data-cleaning workflow and how to use formulas and functions to clean data. This is a general tutorial and it doesn't delve deeply into one program. We'll use Microsoft Excel but most of the same techniques work in Google Spreadsheets and other programs.

Tom Torok (NYT) writes: After years of looking down my nose at Excel because of its limitations, I have to say that I'm very impressed with Excel 2010 when used with a free Microsoft add-in called PowerPivot. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/download-powerpivot-HA101959985.aspx In a PowerPivot tutorial (link below), I imported eight tables  from several sources and joined them - yes, you can join relational data. It uses some magical data compression that allows for lightning fast sorts, filters and calculated fields. The largest table in the tutorial has about 2 million rows. A calculated field on that table took seconds. A did a pivot table on the table and the answers appeared as soon as I selected the fields. In one of  the training videos (http://www.powerpivot.com/) an MS guy works with a 101 million-record table on his laptop. It's really amazing. http://powerpivotsdr.codeplex.com/ If you install, be sure to read the prerequisites or you'll be installing and uninstalling both PowerPivot and Excel. I'm running it on a 32-bit XP machine (it won't run on a 64-bit XP but will work on Windows 7 64-bit). The tutorial is for a Windows 7 setup, but there are items in the menu bar that match the reference to the tutorial's ribbon. I noticed that if I call up an xlsx by double clicking on a file in Windows Explorer that PowerPivot is not enabled in the ribbon. If you call up a file from within Excel 2010 everything works as advertised.Regards, TT  

TileMill is an application for making beautiful maps. Whether you're a journalist, web designer, researcher, or seasoned cartographer, TileMill is the design studio you need to create compelling, interactive maps. Download TileMill For Mac OS X & Linux Documentation Manual, tutorials, & more Powered by Open Source TileMill is built on a suite of modern open source libraries including Mapnik, node.js, backbone.js, express and CodeMirror. Jump on GitHub where you can dig into the source code. http://mapbox.com/tilemillTileMill is an application for making beautiful maps. Whether you're a journalist, web designer, researcher, or seasoned cartographer, TileMill is the design studio you need to create compelling, interactive maps. Download TileMill For Mac OS X & Linux Documentation Manual, tutorials, & more Powered by Open Source Only for OSX TileMill is built on a suite of modern open source libraries including Mapnik, node.js, backbone.js, express and CodeMirror. Jump on GitHub where you can dig into the source code. http://mapbox.com/tilemill

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

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

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

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.

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.

Express Planner http://www.planningforce-express.com/ Those persons with a yen for project management will want to take a look at Planning Force's Express Planner. The program is designed for those doing work in project management and business, and it gives users the ability to apply calendars to projects and tasks, prioritize items, and create reports. The site includes several tutorials, and it is compatible with computers running Linux and Windows 2000 and newer. [KMG]

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

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.

"RegExr is an online tool for editing and testing Regular Expressions (RegExp / RegEx). It provides a simple interface to enter RegEx expressions, and visualize matches in real-time editable source text. It also provides a handy RegExp snippet sidebar with descriptions and usage examples to make it easier to learn Regular Expressions through trial and error. It isn't as powerful as a product like RegExBuddy, but it has the advantage of being online and free. I will be releasing a free desktop version for Mac OSX and Windows built with AIR in the next day or two. So far this has only taken a day of development, and the main app is only 150 lines of code. Flex 3 makes this kind of app so darn simple to put together."

Learn to code Codecademy is the easiest way to learn how to code. It's interactive, fun, and you can do it with your friends.