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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.

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.

Welcome to Graphviz Available translations:Belorussian What is Graphviz? Graphviz is open source graph visualization software. Graph visualization is a way of representing structural information as diagrams of abstract graphs and networks. It has important applications in networking, bioinformatics, software engineering, database and web design, machine learning, and in visual interfaces for other technical domains. Features The Graphviz layout programs take descriptions of graphs in a simple text language, and make diagrams in useful formats, such as images and SVG for web pages, PDF or Postscript for inclusion in other documents; or display in an interactive graph browser. (Graphviz also supports GXL, an XML dialect.) Graphviz has many useful features for concrete diagrams, such as options for colors, fonts, tabular node layouts, line styles, hyperlinks, rolland custom shapes.

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.

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.

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.

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/

Document mining shows Paul Ryan relying on the the programs he criticizes by Jonathan Stray on 11/02/2012 0 One of the jobs of a journalist is to check the record. When Congressman Paul Ryan became a vice-presidential candidate, Associated Press reporter Jack Gillum decided to examine the candidate through his own words. Hundreds of Freedom of Information requests and 9,000 pages later, Gillum wrote a story showing that Ryan has asked for money from many of the same Federal programs he has criticized as wasteful, including stimulus money and funding for alternative fuels. This would have been much more difficult without special software for journalism. In this case Gillum relied on two tools: DocumentCloud to upload, OCR, and search the documents, and Overview to automatically sort the documents into topics and visualize the contents. Both projects are previous Knight News Challenge winners. But first Gillum had to get the documents. As a member of Congress, Ryan isn't subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Instead, Gillum went to every federal agency - whose files are covered under FOIA - for copies of letters or emails that might identify Ryan's favored causes, names of any constituents who sought favors, and more. Bit by bit, the documents arrived - on paper. The stack grew over weeks, eventually piling up two feet high on Gillum's desk. Then he scanned the pages and loaded them into the AP's internal installation of DocumentCloud. The software converts the scanned pages to searchable text, but there were still 9000 pages of material. That's where Overview came in. Developed in house at the Associated Press, this open-source visualization tool processes the full text of each document and clusters similar documents together, producing a visualization that graphically shows the contents of the complete document set. "I used Overview to take these 9000 pages of documents, and knowing there was probably going to be a lot of garbage or ext

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:

How Overview turns Documents into Pictures by Jonathan Stray on 06/04/2012 | 0 Overview produces intricate visualizations of large document sets - beautiful, but what do they mean? These visualizations are saying something about the documents, which you can interpret if you know a little about how they're plotted. There are two visualizations in the current prototype version of Overview, and both are based on document clustering.

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:

SchemaSpy Graphical Database Schema Metadata Browser SourceForge.net Sample Output FAQ Download Release Notes Support SchemaSpy John Currier Recent Donors: Anonymous monocongoProject Donor chervitzProject DonorAccepting Donations Support SchemaSpy Do you hate starting on a new project and having to try to figure out someone else's idea of a database? Or are you in QA and the developers expect you to understand all the relationships in their schema? If so then this tool's for you. SchemaSpy is a Java-based tool (requires Java 5 or higher) that analyzes the metadata of a schema in a database and generates a visual representation of it in a browser-displayable format. It lets you click through the hierarchy of database tables via child and parent table relationships as represented by both HTML links and entity-relationship diagrams. It's also designed to help resolve the obtuse errors that a database sometimes gives related to failures due to constraints.

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.

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

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."

"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."