Visualising Data

Quadrigram: New visual programming environment launches

Andy Kirk — Tue, 15 May 2012 18:23:27 +0000

In recent months we’ve seen a number of new developments on the tools side of the visualisation field. We’ve had Datawrapper, the Miso project and are still waiting in anticipation for the releases of polychart and plot.io. Today sees the launch of Quadrigram, a ‘Visual Programming Environment to gather, shape, and share living data’.

Quadrigram is a paid-for tool designed to enable everyone who works with data, regardless of their technical, programming capabilities, to create powerful, flexible and custom visualisations. For those of you out there looking to go beyond the bar chart/Excel this should interest you. There is a trial version to get your hands on it before committing to the pricing plans.

You can read about its many features and capabilities here and watch the movie below to see its use in exploratory data analysis. There are also loads of tutorials and guides to help you understand how to use this tool to get the best out of your data visualisations.

You can follow Quadrigram’s developments via its site, the blog, and connect on Facebook and on Twitter.

Best of the visualisation web… April 2012 (part 2)

Andy Kirk — Mon, 14 May 2012 02:34:26 +0000

At the end of each month I pull together a collection of links to some of the most relevant, interesting or thought-provoking web content I’ve come across during the previous month. If you follow me on Twitter you will see many of these items shared as soon as I find them.

Here’s part one of the latest collection from April 2012 (see part one):

Vis4.net | Rendering high resolution maps in Kartograph | Mapping Tutorial

Interactives | Edward Segel: interactive features should scream interactivity | Video

FastCo Design | ‘Infographic Turns Boring Corporate Workflow Into Buzzing Metropolis’ | Illustration

InfograhpicsNews | Profile of the New York Times’ experiment with gamification | Article

Ben Willers | Looking at alternatives methods of stacking data in visualisation | Methods

After The Flood | Smart videographic about the Titantic for the BBC History website | Video

Visual.ly | ‘Dear NASA: No More Rainbow Color Scales, Please’ | Article

Visualopolis | Alberto Cairo asks ‘Why is infographic plagiarism so common?’ | Article

New York Times | ‘Connecting Music and Gesture’ – Beautiful animated work to capture the movement of Alan Gilbert, music director of the New York Philharmonic | Animation

Wall Street Journal | ‘Making Data Beautiful’ – How the most inspiring new art is visualized information | Article

Guardian | Worth learning from, ‘A manifesto for the simple scribe – my 25 commandments for journalists’ | Article

XKCD | Illustrated work to explain the depths of various lakes and oceans | Visualisation

Eager Eyes | Robert Kosara explores what it means to inform | Article

FastCo Design | How GM Is Saving Cash Using Legos As A Data Viz Tool | Article

Google Think Quarterly | ‘Data Visions’ – The explosion of data is inspiring a new generation of digital artists determined to reshape the way we see the world… | Article

New York Times | Setting the stage for the Titanic tragedy | Infographic

Michael Babwahsingh | ‘Stalking the Viz-Elephant’ – getting deeper in to the discussions of important visualisation issues | Article

Forbes | Tim O’Reilly on the Future of Location: “The Guy with the Most Data Wins” | Article

Wired | Want to work at Google? Answer these questions | Artticle

Letters of Note | David Ogilvy’s letter that declares how he is a ‘lousy copywriter’ | Article

Density Design | The many ways of visualising Twitter | Collections

This is Visual | The Faces of the Champions League semi-finalists | Visualisation

Chartsnthings | Process narrative for the New York Times’ visualisation about Rick Santorum’s campaign | Process Narrative

Wired | Adidas brings you the first ‘smart’ football match | Article

Google Research | Announcing developments to the Google Fusion Tables features | Article

Guardian | Pioneering German visualisation monitors train delays in real time | Interactive Visualisation

Visual.ly | How to produce motion graphics | Tutorial

Guardian | ‘How can we get our map colours right? How open journalism helped us get better’ | Article

Derek Watkins | ‘A squinty-eyed look at population densities’ | Interactive Visualisation

Presenting the top five most popular posts on Visualising Data during April:

1. Best of the visualisation web… March 2012 (part 1) – April 11th, 2012

2. Best of the visualisation web… March 2012 (part 2) – April 11th, 2012

3. Newly launched – The Miso Project – April 20th, 2012

4. Visual.ly article “10 things you can learn from NYT data visualisations” – April 2nd, 2012

5. Best of the visualisation web… February 2012 (part 1) – April 4th, 2012

Best of the visualisation web… April 2012 (part 1)

Andy Kirk — Mon, 14 May 2012 02:34:06 +0000

Here’s part one of the latest collection from April 2012 (see part two):

American Scientist | ‘Pixels of Perish’ – Article about the challenges and opportunities facing scientific illustration in the new age of online publishing | Article

Forbes | Visualization Offers Continuous Access to Risk Information | Article

BBC News | Pretty pictures: Can images stop data overload? | Article

FlowingData | Video of an incredible digital creation of the Solar System by former game developer, soon to be potentially an application | Video

Computing Now | ‘Visualization Viewpoints: In Color Perception, Size Matters’ article from noted colour expert Maureen Stone | Article

State Impact/NPR | Visualisation plots the severity of the US drought across the country over time | Interactive Visualisations

Datavisualization.ch | Pathline: Connecting Designers With Scientists | Tool Profile

Eye Magazine | “It may be a masterpiece but Google Maps is losing ground to its rivals” | Article

Neoformix | Jeff Clark visualises the flow of ‘Movement in Manhattan’ using twitter geolocation data | Visualisation

Spatial Analysis | James Cheshire’s analysis of the ‘Twitter Languages of London’ | Visualisation

New York Times | A groundbreaking 3D-vision video version of the famous graphic ‘How Mariano Rivera Dominates Hitters’ | Video

Drawar | Interesting article about the question ‘What is Simple?’ | Article

Tableau | Drew Skau’s guest post on the Future of Data Visualization | Article

Data Remixed | Audio interview with Lisa Zhang, one of the creators behind upcoming tool, Polychart | Audio Interview

Eager Eyes | Robert investigates the ‘Explanatory Power of Data Points’ | Article

Chartsnthings | More excellent process narrative from Kevin Quealy as he looks at the NYT’s ‘White House Visits and Democratic Donors’ visualisation | Process Narrative

Jerome Cukier | Jerome explores the potential for developing Treemaps in Tableau | Tutorial

Jason Davies | Jason develops Parallel Sets for visualising multi-dimensional categorical data using D3 | Code Tutorial

Flowing Data | Brilliantly awful graphic from the World Happiness Report | Bad Visualisation

Juice Analytics | Article which explores how ‘the people who practice data analysis and visualization have their own set of immutable conflicts’ | Article

BBC Science & Environment | Cryosat mission’s new views of polar ice | Video

YouTube | Ben Welsh’s presentation at ISOJ 2012 – Data Driven Journalism event | Video

The Guardian | Interactive: MIT researchers map energy use and building material intensity across US cities | Interactive Visualisation

FastCo Design | Trulia Spendthrift Visualizer Spots The Cheapest Houses In The Best Neighborhoods | Article/Visualisation

Datavisualization.ch | Process narrative about ‘How We Visualized the Vividness of Geneva’ – AKA the Ville Vivante project | Process Narrative

Infosthetics | Profiling the ‘City Dashboard’ which aggregates all spatial data for cities | Article/Visualisation

YouTube | John Cleese On Creativity | Video

New York Times | Article about the humble pie chart | Article

Globaia | Video which plots the expansion of the world’s transit routes | Video

Eager Eyes | Robert investigates the idea of gamification and play in the communication of data | Article

Presenting the top five most popular posts on Visualising Data during April:

1. Best of the visualisation web… March 2012 (part 1) – April 11th, 2012

2. Best of the visualisation web… March 2012 (part 2) – April 11th, 2012

3. Newly launched – The Miso Project – April 20th, 2012

4. Visual.ly article “10 things you can learn from NYT data visualisations” – April 2nd, 2012

5. Best of the visualisation web… February 2012 (part 1) – April 4th, 2012

A little update on things to break my silence!

Andy Kirk — Tue, 08 May 2012 13:51:22 +0000

Hello everyone. I felt compelled to break the silence with a brief update on matters. I’ve had quite a lot of traffic round these parts of late, thanks to sharing of my data journalism handbook post and Nathan’s inclusion of my site on his collection of blog reads, but by now people are probably wondering why the lights are on but there’s seemingly nobody home!

Packed Training Schedule
One of the main reason for my current dry blog post spell is that I’m firmly in the midst of my packed training schedule. I’ve had a few private events lately and tomorrow I fly over to New York to begin a three date tour in NYC, DC and Baltimore. When I return I’m on a 2 week Italian holiday and then back over to Chicago and Toronto for another chunk of time. This means my posting frequency has been and might continue to be somewhat sporadic for the near future but once the middle of June arrives, the acceleration will be significant.

I’ve had a number of people starting to ask when I’ll be arranging and announcing my training schedule for the latter half of 2012/start of 2013. Well, the simple answer is I’ve not had time to think about it but I will be doing a formal call out for suggested locations soon. In the meantime, just drop me an email with your preferred location and I’ll throw it into the mix!

Upcoming posts
I’ve got so many half-finished/half-started blog posts in my draft folder it is becoming quite incompetent, especially as for many of the subjects the moment has somewhat passed, but I hope to rattle off a few key posts over the next month or so:

I’ll be knuckling down soon to compile the usual best of the visualisation web collection for April. There’s just too much good stuff to make this a lightweight task!
Benjamin’s recent post about the data visualisation tools collection has inspired me to finally face up to the task of refreshing and making complete this series of essential visualisation resources posts. I’ve got about 30 tools to add to the collection and all sorts of updates to make here and there.
I’ve also got to finish off my long overdue collection of data handling tools and places to get data for this same resources series.
I’ve got some great interviews/designer profiles lined up in the next month and hope to have these out as soon as they are ready.
I’ve got a number of guest posts to finish off and publish on O’Reilly Radar
I’m also going to be launching what I hope will become an annual survey about the state of the visualisation field, that’s nearly ready but I’m not ready for the dealing with all the data, analysis and presentation of the findings side of things!
I’ve got outstanding reviews of Designing Data Visualizations and Visual Complexity (the delay for those has been embarrassing and I apologise to the authors!)
I’m going to do some reflective write-ups about my training experiences and discuss further the potential importance of data visualisation education in schools/universities
It won’t be long until I will be sharing my opinions on the most significant developments of the first 6 months of this year
Finally, with the Euro Championships looming I may be repeating my previous collections of football visualisations found on various media/web platforms

Visualing Data: The Reboot
Once June is out of the way I have loads of plans for a bit of a Visualising Data reboot which will see the site being stripped back and rebuilt brick by brick. I’m going to be looking at a new look, a new feel and definitely an enhanced approach to the content side of things too. If you have any deep felt opinions about what the site should and/or shouldn’t be, feel free to get in touch via email - I can’t guarantee it will turn out as you suggest but happy to receive any informed opinions.

Book
Last, but not least, I’m currently also very occupied with writing my first book. As you may have heard on the recent Data Stories podcast I am in the middle of working hard on an e-book which will be published later in the year. I won’t share any further details at this stage but watch out for further announcements in due course. I will, however, share news that this isn’t the only book I’m working on…

Anyway, enough self-promotion for now, just thought I’d let you know what’s going down at Visualising Data HQ.

The Data Journalism Handbook is now live

Andy Kirk — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 22:38:49 +0000

The Data Journalism Handbook is a free, open-source reference for anyone interested in the field of data journalism. It features contributions from over 70 of the leading global voices of authority and has now been released, remarkably only 6 months after its conception. It is a joint initiative between the European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation and is published by O’Reilly Media.

The Handbook’s list of contributors reads like a who’s who of the major names in this field, such as the New York Times, Zeit Online, the BBC and the Guardian, but the additional impressive aspect is that it is an entirely open source reference:

The Handbook is an open educational resource, under a creative commons licence (CC-BY-SA) so please share it with your friends and remix it. We hope that it will encourage many budding data journalists to look at data as a source and give them courage to tackle it, as well as showcasing some great examples of journalism using data as inspiration for future stories.

In terms of contents, after its introduction, the book covers life in the newsroom, a series of data journalism case studies, and then three chapters dedicated to the challenges of data: getting it, understanding it and delivering it. For those of us with a specific data visualisation slant, it is the last chapter which has most direct relevance and these are the sections covered within:

A free web version of the book can be viewed here. Alternatively, if you wish to pay for an e- or print version from O’Reilly Media, you can pre-order now and just wait a few more weeks for it.

Many congratulations to the project coordinators Liliana and Lucy who have worked incredibly hard, alongside others too many to list, to get this project across the finishing line. It looks like a super resource and I’ll be sure to take a good read through as soon as the opportunity arises!

Data Stories podcast: Episode 5, another appearance!

Andy Kirk — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 22:26:34 +0000

Hot from the Bremen sound studio is the brand new release of Episode 5 of the Data Stories podcast with Enrico, Moritz and me, as a returning invited guest. In this episode we cover the subject of data visualisation training, a subject clearly close to my heart.

Many thanks again to Enrico and Moritz for inviting me on the show for a second time, as with the previous experience, it was a good laugh!

Come along to a Big Data Week 2012 event

Andy Kirk — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 09:28:54 +0000

This week sees the launch of Big Data Week 2012, a series of free, interconnected activities and events taking place across the globe. The aim of the events is to have contemporary conversations about Big Data, bringing together the communities of Data Scientists, Data Technologies, Data Visualization ad Data Business.

I will be taking part in the Big Data Community Meetup, in London on Tuesday 24th April. I will be on a moderated panel discussion and audience Q&A session with:

Doug Cutting, co-founder of the Apache Hadoop project and creator of Nutch and Lucene
Nick Halstead, Founder/CTO DataSift
Hilary Mason, Bit.ly Chief Scientist
Edd Dumbill, Program Chair Strata Conference – Moderator

As I say, this is a completely free event, all you have to do is register here and join about 200 other people at this event alone. The event is being held at the Lancaster Hotel, London W2 2TY and kicks off around 6:30pm (but get there from 5:00pm as I heard rumours of nibbles…).

Whether you attend the event or not, there is a (genuinely) very brief survey being held to canvas opinion about big data, business, technology etc. You can complete the survey here.

If you are following the events on twitter check out the @BigDataWeek timeline and follow the conversation via the hashtags #bigdataweek or #bdwldn.

Newly launched – The Miso Project

Andy Kirk — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 12:33:28 +0000

This week has seen the launch of The Miso Project, an “open source toolkit designed to expedite the creation of high-quality interactive storytelling and data visualisation content”. It is a joint development between The Guardian (with Alastair Dant and Alex Graul at the helm) and Boston-based Bocoup (led by Irene Ros).

The first set of libraries released is entitled Dataset is a JavaScript client-side data ‘transformation and management’ library which makes life easier for visualisation designers by “handling loading, parsing, sorting, querying and manipulating data from all sorts of sources”.

Visiting the Dataset pages brings up a number of examples which showcase the different stages of a data transformation and management process. The main example shows Cabinet Office Spending and is presented as an interactive tree map to demonstrate selecting and connecting to remote data files as well as grouping data.

There are also a number of hugely helpful tutorials and complete access is provided to the API documentation and the source code via GitHub,

Miso is in active development and so expect a number of releases landing in the coming months. You can follow the project’s developments on the main site and via Twitter (@TheMisoProject).

An update on my data visualisation training courses

Andy Kirk — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 12:37:52 +0000

I typically save updates like this for Twitter, but I am aware that not everybody is on Twitter (just yet, anyway) and there’s only so much you can pack in to 140 characters. So here is a brief update on a few things relating to my ‘Introduction to Data Visualisation‘ training courses.

Venues

I now have confirmed venues for most of my upcoming schedule with Chicago, Bristol and Edinburgh being the most recent updates:

London	Thu, 26 April	Torrington Room, Senate House, University of London, WC1E 7HU
New York City	Fri, 11 May	Room 442, Graduate School of Journalism, CUNY, 219 West 40th Street
Washington DC	Mon, 14 May	The Foundation Center, 1627 K Street
Baltimore	Wed 16 May	Brown 413, Maryland Institute College of Art, 1300 Mt. Royal Avenue
Chicago	Fri, 15 June	University Center Conference Chicago, 525 South State Street
Toronto	Mon, 18 June	Coming soon…
Bristol	Fri, 29 June	Clifton Hill House, University of Bristol, Clifton, BS8 1BX
Edinburgh	Fri, 6 July	Salisbury Green Hotel, 18 Holyrood Park Road, EH16 5AY
Amsterdam	Fri, 13 July	Coming soon…

Availability

The London event has long since filled up and I will be looking to arrange another event down there soon, though it is likely to be late summer before I get chance to run the course. In the meantime, Bristol will be the closest alternative for those desperate for the knowledge!

Elsewhere, the other courses that are close to filling are New York City (with four places remaining) and Washington DC (with six). With a maximum class size of 20 people, there are still plenty of spaces on the other courses.

Upcoming Schedule

I am so busy at the moment that I’m going to delay announcing my intended schedule for the second half of 2012 for another month or so. I have received a number of suggestions from people asking if I will be visiting their location but I need to consolidate all these responses and form a cohesive plan. So this is a reminder to register your interest with me via email so that your favoured location can be considered for inclusion.

Baltimore/MICA 20% discount

For those interested in attending the Baltimore training course on Wed 16 May, I’m pleased to announce a 20% discount (reduced delegate rate at £200) for any staff, students or alumni of the Maryland Institute College of Art. If you think you qualify for this discount please email Andy Kirk to arrange your booking.

Additional Courses

Towards the end of this year I’m hoping to be in position to announce further course offerings to complement the introductory one, with some intermediate/advanced and hand-on sessions being conceived. I will keep you posted on any updates regarding this. I am also exploring ways of possibly doing video tutorials to reach those people in far off lands! However, this is a secondary priority to continuing with the existing introductory course and developing the additional ones.

Private Events

I have had a number of enquiries about designing and delivering private training courses. I have done and will be doing training sessions for some extremely prominent organisations, details of which I will share at a later date for confidentiality reasons. If your organisation would be interested in having a private session arranged on your site just let me know via email and we’ll look at the options to suit your needs.

Data Stories Podcast

Finally, if you want to hear more about these training courses I am lined up to join Enrico and Moritz on the award-worthy Data Stories podcast, due in the next week or two.

Poster shows visual breakdown of cinematic project

Andy Kirk — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 19:12:06 +0000

Platage Image is a Poland-based high-quality animation studio. Today they have shared details of their recent work for a promotional/introductory video for the forthcoming Xbox 360 video game ‘The Witcher 2‘. To accompany this release they have produced a detailed visualisation which captures the hard work and complexity of the challenge faced by their artists, designers and coders in producing this rich 4 minute video project – the product of nine months’ work.

The main visualisation element displays the dozens of tasks performed concurrently by a team of over 50 people, from animation, rendering and composition through to FX, scene set-up and lighting.

Each concentric track displays a key quantitative measure to highlight the substantial volume of intricate work that goes into each element.

It starts with the animatic, the structure of which dictates the scenes and shots that comprise the film. Each shot, in turn, has been organized by characters and layers, as well as the time and gigabytes of data used in its creation. The information is arranged in a structured hierarchy with marked parent and child categories. This layout makes it possible to compare and explore information at different levels of depth.

Towards the bottom of the piece, which you can access by visiting the main site and clicking on ‘download poster’, you get a network diagram showing the relationship between the actors/characters in the video as well as a radial calendar of the project as a timeline.

It is quite a lot to digest in one go but as you spend time reading each layer you really appreciate the amount of effort and the different layers of design activity taking place, even for just a short 4 minute video. For more information about this project visit www.thewitcher.com/visualdata. The final video is available to watch below:

Sense of Patterns: New visualisation project from Mahir Yavuz