Visualisations for the Rest of Us - How to

Create Rich Interactive Visualisations Without

Any of the PainTony Hirst

Communication and Systems,The Open University

StorytellingS nsemaking

( Data Driven Journalism )

“Personal dashboards”

BIG DATA

Taking aMACROSCOPIC

view

Visual Analysisor

Presentation Graphics?

Data

VisualAnalysis

Data

(Visual)Analysis

PresentationGraphics

Data

(Visual)Analysis

PresentationGraphics

Data

InteractiveVisualisation

Spreadsheet charts

Visualisation applications

Off-the-shelf visualisation components

Bespoke programmed visualisations

For the creator

Data Shapes

“Shape Sorter”, by Ella’s Dad

Data representation is key…

“Key”, by dewitt

What makes for a good visualisation tool?

ComparingSortingAdding variablesFilteringHighlightingAggregatingRe-expressingRe-visualisingZooming and PanningRe-scaling

Key Properties of an Effective

Visualisation Environment

So let’s start at the beginning…

…with the DATA

GetTheData.org

Manipulating DataSpreadsheetText editorDatabase/query languageMaths/stats toolProgramming language

(Data cleansing tool)

GoogleRefine

Stanford Data Wrangler

In the right format, or in the right environment, a “dataset as document” can become a

queryable database

http://bit.l

y/dFCKxM

Fishing for ideas and keeping up…

http://www.improving-visualisation.org/

http://infosthetics.com/

http://flowingdata.com/

IBM’sMany Eyes

Tableau

Google Public

Data Explorer

Gephi

Link reception (2 receipts)

Using colour for a reason

So how many dimensions does support?

• X and Y (at a push, Z)• Node size and colour• (Node label size and colour)• Edge thickness and colour• (Edge label and colour)• Node proximity/grouping• Clustering

• Filtering and differential application of the above

Progressive Enhancement

Data filtering

Programmed visualisations

Protovis

Hand-coded visualisations:

Protovis

Processing

Using R for creating visualisations

http://bit.ly/iMZF75

R-Studio

Data Journalism Developer

Studio

Data Science Toolkit

(Probably no time for)

QUESTIONS…?

http://blog.ouseful.in

fo

@psychemedia